Heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter who is allegedly in charge; it’s my (mass co-op, usually) game to win, so I’m going to play it”. where, even if you’re in a big co-op game lobby, and everyone is trying to achieve the same shared goal (eg, win the raid, succeed at hanabi, not die from AI, get lunch, whatever), then your actions are what you have locus of control over, so it’s up to you to steer as hard as you can towards the shared outcome actually occurring. This applies less to competitive games because it’s more obvious there that if you want to win, you just need to go hard. It applies less to being officially in charge of commanding others, because again, relatively obvious that you need to go hard. the unusual thing is applying it to everything, seeing your whole life as a single “get all the things I desire, including the desires that care about others” game, and realizing that means that just waiting for others to dispense the right items to win will not get you best probability of winning.
And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter what role I have”, and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.
And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter what role I have”, and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.
Yeah, it’s not particularly heroic if you’re The Guy, even if it means you’re the one putting in 70-hour weeks fixing stuff that crops up to keep the business running because if you don’t fix it, nobody will, and the business will collapse.
Meanwhile, https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility — that I got to by clicking on the tag above the post that reads “Heroic Responsibility” — seems significantly clearer about the heroism aspect, and I don’t think having read HPMOR ages ago means it’s all that extra understandable compared to Joe Q. Public.
The idea/claim that heroic responsibility is important and high-value for people not in leadership positions is separate from the concept of heroic responsibility. At some point I do want a post explaining/arguing why hufflepuffs need heroic responsibility, but that post works a lot better if the argument is cleanly separated from the concept.
Hufflepuff is more of a literary reference, it means “people that are more down to earth, not particularly ambitious, but, are warm and empathetic and operationally competent and reliably show up every day to do the shit that needs doing”. It’s not, like, a particularly natural way of carving up psychometrics, I wrote “Project Hufflepuff” because it was a shared literary reference I could easily build on at the time.
I don’t think that explanation would paint the right picture in the head of someone who doesn’t already have most of the picture.
A closer pointer IMO: “hufflepuff” is about being the opposite of individualistic. It’s the personality type which wants to be part of a team, and stick to their role within that team, support their teammates and be supported by their teammates (including the warm and empathetic part), be reliable for their teammates, etc. It’s also usually the personality type for which The Importance of Sidekicks really clicks. It’s highly correlated with “submissive” in the BDSM sense, especially the aspect of wanting someone else to take the lead.
It’s also a difficult personality type to talk about, because it’s a little too easy for “hufflepuff” to morph into an insult about having low agency. Competent agentic hufflepuffs are really spectacularly high value—a fact that most people experienced in leadership positions will attest (Mo’s comment gives several good examples). Unfortunately, the median hufflepuff… isn’t that. (Indeed, a major motivation for writing up this post is that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years now some posts on “rationalism for subs”, which is centrally about being the high-value sort of hufflepuff.)
That is an incredibly useful definition for a term I’ve seen floating around here for years — thanks!
…could it be put somewhere moderately prominent, where people can stumble over it?
I’m kind of hoping it could be somewhere prominent in the first page of results on https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=hufflepuff. I’m looking at https://www.lesswrong.com/sequences/oyZGWX9WkgWzEDt6M and while your comment’s definition makes the page make sense, I wouldn’t be able to independently generate your comment’s definition from “comradery, reliability, trustworthiness, willingness to do physical work, willingness to stick with things for a long time, etc.”.
Heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter who is allegedly in charge; it’s my (mass co-op, usually) game to win, so I’m going to play it”. where, even if you’re in a big co-op game lobby, and everyone is trying to achieve the same shared goal (eg, win the raid, succeed at hanabi, not die from AI, get lunch, whatever), then your actions are what you have locus of control over, so it’s up to you to steer as hard as you can towards the shared outcome actually occurring. This applies less to competitive games because it’s more obvious there that if you want to win, you just need to go hard. It applies less to being officially in charge of commanding others, because again, relatively obvious that you need to go hard. the unusual thing is applying it to everything, seeing your whole life as a single “get all the things I desire, including the desires that care about others” game, and realizing that means that just waiting for others to dispense the right items to win will not get you best probability of winning.
And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter what role I have”, and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.
Yeah, it’s not particularly heroic if you’re The Guy, even if it means you’re the one putting in 70-hour weeks fixing stuff that crops up to keep the business running because if you don’t fix it, nobody will, and the business will collapse.
Meanwhile, https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility — that I got to by clicking on the tag above the post that reads “Heroic Responsibility” — seems significantly clearer about the heroism aspect, and I don’t think having read HPMOR ages ago means it’s all that extra understandable compared to Joe Q. Public.
The idea/claim that heroic responsibility is important and high-value for people not in leadership positions is separate from the concept of heroic responsibility. At some point I do want a post explaining/arguing why hufflepuffs need heroic responsibility, but that post works a lot better if the argument is cleanly separated from the concept.
Is “Hufflepuff” (as a personality type) described anywhere concisely and more or less completely on LW? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbdP8hD2AcKcdSsgF/project-hufflepuff-planting-the-flag seems like the closest thing to an explainer, but it seems incomplete. (https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility is exactly the sort of explainer that I’d want for Hufflepuff.)
Hufflepuff is more of a literary reference, it means “people that are more down to earth, not particularly ambitious, but, are warm and empathetic and operationally competent and reliably show up every day to do the shit that needs doing”. It’s not, like, a particularly natural way of carving up psychometrics, I wrote “Project Hufflepuff” because it was a shared literary reference I could easily build on at the time.
I don’t think that explanation would paint the right picture in the head of someone who doesn’t already have most of the picture.
A closer pointer IMO: “hufflepuff” is about being the opposite of individualistic. It’s the personality type which wants to be part of a team, and stick to their role within that team, support their teammates and be supported by their teammates (including the warm and empathetic part), be reliable for their teammates, etc. It’s also usually the personality type for which The Importance of Sidekicks really clicks. It’s highly correlated with “submissive” in the BDSM sense, especially the aspect of wanting someone else to take the lead.
It’s also a difficult personality type to talk about, because it’s a little too easy for “hufflepuff” to morph into an insult about having low agency. Competent agentic hufflepuffs are really spectacularly high value—a fact that most people experienced in leadership positions will attest (Mo’s comment gives several good examples). Unfortunately, the median hufflepuff… isn’t that. (Indeed, a major motivation for writing up this post is that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years now some posts on “rationalism for subs”, which is centrally about being the high-value sort of hufflepuff.)
Okay yeah that explanation is way better.
That is an incredibly useful definition for a term I’ve seen floating around here for years — thanks!
…could it be put somewhere moderately prominent, where people can stumble over it?
I’m kind of hoping it could be somewhere prominent in the first page of results on https://www.lesswrong.com/search?query=hufflepuff. I’m looking at https://www.lesswrong.com/sequences/oyZGWX9WkgWzEDt6M and while your comment’s definition makes the page make sense, I wouldn’t be able to independently generate your comment’s definition from “comradery, reliability, trustworthiness, willingness to do physical work, willingness to stick with things for a long time, etc.”.