I think this part of Heroic Responsibility isn’t too surprising/novel to people. Obviously the business owner has responsibility for the business. The part that’s novel is more like:
If I’m some guy working in legal, and I notice this hot potato going around, and it’s explicitly not my job to deal with it, I might nonetheless say “ugh, the CEO is too busy to deal with this today and it’s not anyone else’s job. I will deal with it.” Then you go to each department head, even if you’re not even a department head you’re a lowly intern (say), and say “guys, I think we need to decide who’s going to deal with this.”
And if their ego won’t let them take advice from an intern, you might also take it as your responsibility to figure out how to navigate their ego – maybe by making them feel like it was their own idea, or by threatening to escalate to the CEO if they don’t get to it themselves, or by appealing to their sense of duty.
A great example of this, staying with them realm of “random Bureaucracy”, I got from @Elizabeth:
E. D. Morel was a random bureaucrat at a shipping company in 1891. He noticed that his company was shipping guns and manacles into the Congo, and shipping rubber and other resources back out to Britain.
It was not Morel’s job to notice that this was a bit weird.
It was not Morel’s job to notice that that weirdness was a clue, and look into those clues. And then find out that what was happening was, weapons were being sent to the Congo to forcibly steal resources at gunpoint.
It was not his job to make it his mission to raise awareness of the Congo abuses and stop them.
But he did.
...
P.S. A failure mode of rationalists is to try to take Heroic responsibility for everything, esp. in a sort of angsty way that is counterproductive and exhausting. It’s also a failure mode to act as if only you can possibly take Heroic responsibility, rather than trying to model the ecosystem around you and the other actors (some of whom might be Live Players who are also taking Heroic Responsibility, some of whom might be sort of local actors following normal incentives but are still, like, part of the solution)
There is nuance to when and how to do Heroic Responsibility well.
One thing filed away in my head for another post at some point: even if you’re trying to be a hufflepuff, and don’t really want to be in charge of other people or yourself, if you want to be a high-value hufflepuff you still need to take heroic responsibility pretty often. Like, from e.g. the business owner’s perspective, the really high value employees are the ones who can take heroic responsibility for the tasks they’re given and get them done whatever it takes without the business owner having to allocate further attention.
I think this part of Heroic Responsibility isn’t too surprising/novel to people. Obviously the business owner has responsibility for the business. The part that’s novel is more like:
If I’m some guy working in legal, and I notice this hot potato going around, and it’s explicitly not my job to deal with it, I might nonetheless say “ugh, the CEO is too busy to deal with this today and it’s not anyone else’s job. I will deal with it.” Then you go to each department head, even if you’re not even a department head you’re a lowly intern (say), and say “guys, I think we need to decide who’s going to deal with this.”
And if their ego won’t let them take advice from an intern, you might also take it as your responsibility to figure out how to navigate their ego – maybe by making them feel like it was their own idea, or by threatening to escalate to the CEO if they don’t get to it themselves, or by appealing to their sense of duty.
A great example of this, staying with them realm of “random Bureaucracy”, I got from @Elizabeth:
E. D. Morel was a random bureaucrat at a shipping company in 1891. He noticed that his company was shipping guns and manacles into the Congo, and shipping rubber and other resources back out to Britain.
It was not Morel’s job to notice that this was a bit weird.
It was not Morel’s job to notice that that weirdness was a clue, and look into those clues. And then find out that what was happening was, weapons were being sent to the Congo to forcibly steal resources at gunpoint.
It was not his job to make it his mission to raise awareness of the Congo abuses and stop them.
But he did.
...
P.S. A failure mode of rationalists is to try to take Heroic responsibility for everything, esp. in a sort of angsty way that is counterproductive and exhausting. It’s also a failure mode to act as if only you can possibly take Heroic responsibility, rather than trying to model the ecosystem around you and the other actors (some of whom might be Live Players who are also taking Heroic Responsibility, some of whom might be sort of local actors following normal incentives but are still, like, part of the solution)
There is nuance to when and how to do Heroic Responsibility well.
One thing filed away in my head for another post at some point: even if you’re trying to be a hufflepuff, and don’t really want to be in charge of other people or yourself, if you want to be a high-value hufflepuff you still need to take heroic responsibility pretty often. Like, from e.g. the business owner’s perspective, the really high value employees are the ones who can take heroic responsibility for the tasks they’re given and get them done whatever it takes without the business owner having to allocate further attention.
I am reminded of the Message for Garcia essay as a pretty striking example of this.