“Having both the motivation and the mental stamina to work 60-hour weeks reliably.” Actually this probably would be “hard” rather than “impossible”. There are things I can try here that I haven’t tried that might work, so I have not yet tried enough things to declare it impossible. It’s more like I anticipate the possibility of this being impossible, as opposed to actually considering it impossible. Not a good example.
“Gaining 15+ points of IQ or the thing that IQ is measuring.”—So it seems like there are two ways this problem could go. In World A, there exists some stack of exercises and nootropics that can already let me do this without sacrificing something I’m not willing to sacrifice. In this case the problem is that of finding it—people can bullshit or lie, supplements are not a field where I expect complete honesty, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a high amount of individualism such that someone could truthfully say they gained 15+ IQ points on X, but I need Y instead to achieve the same outcome. If I had to try each combination myself I’d run out of time very quickly. It’s impossible in the sense of winning the lottery is impossible—not something I can reliably make happen, as opposed to literally can’t be done. This is close enough that I consider it to be equivalent.
Alternatively, maybe this stack just doesn’t exist at all. Nootropics and exercises will not get you there. In which case, solving the problem means making advances in cognitive science that our culture hasn’t yet figured out how to do. And it’s not clear to me how I would succeed where lots of others have failed, here—leading onto my third point, I don’t see how I have a comparative advantage in this area, and if I have to work full-time for years to get to this point it is no longer worth it, when the point is to make me more effective at solving my current chosen problem.
“Taking something that isn’t my comparative advantage and making it that way”—I can think of a bunch of actions I can take here that would let me do better than I currently am. Getting tutoring, improving my ability to learn, talking it over with more experienced practitioners, etc. The key impossibility here is that people who are better than me at this can just do this stuff too and probably already are.
Like, imagine I want to be a top mathematician since I’m convinced that’s the only skill worth knowing for alignment. I can hire a tutor (and have done so), but better mathematicians can also do this and probably have. How do you get good enough to meaningfully contribute when people exist in this field who did the IMO at 17 and can do any of the same improvements I can come up with? So, I would have to find some method that was A) Incredibly effective, enough to bring me up to par with more talented people and B) Other people are unable or unwilling to do this thing, even really talented people in the field.
“Having both the motivation and the mental stamina to work 60-hour weeks reliably.” Actually this probably would be “hard” rather than “impossible”. There are things I can try here that I haven’t tried that might work, so I have not yet tried enough things to declare it impossible. It’s more like I anticipate the possibility of this being impossible, as opposed to actually considering it impossible. Not a good example
Well since the point of this is that sometimes you can do impossible things, and the point is to notice the anticipation of impossibility and dig more into it, I’m still interested: what goes wrong if you tried to do this? What’s impossible and/or hard about it?
Outside of the office, I generally find it difficult to get appreciable amounts of work done. It feels like it takes a significant exertion of willpower to go from not doing a work-related task to doing one, at which point it generally becomes easier to continue with that task for a while. Performing this mental motion a few times per workday is enough for me to get close to full time hours in, but doesn’t feel enough for sixty hours. If I don’t perform this mental motion successfully, I wind up in a state of internal tension where I’m not actually putting in consistent mental effort towards solving the next problem in front of me. I do have a fix for this already—I work better in an office, where everyone around is also working.
So, the natural solution here would be “Find yourself an office type environment doing valuable work where it is entirely normal and expected for people to work these kind of hours.” This runs into the second issue, which is that on the rare occasions I have worked 10+ hours in a day, or generally pushed myself harder to try and stretch the edge of my conscientiousness, I tend to get headaches. Which are both unpleasant and also reduce my productivity, which ruins the entire point of the exercise. (The headaches are a known problem—I’m on a headache preventer that minimizes them. I could try upping the dosage, but I’ve already been told by one doctor that I should probably try not to be on this medication indefinitely.)
This also means that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to an environment where everyone’s expected to work 60 hours, if I then don’t end up being able to do that even with the social and logistical environment set up in my favor. So it’d have to be an environment where it was both normal and expected to work 60 hours AND to work 40, AND the work was object-level valuable in my opinion, to be worth trying this experiment. This could be possible—I haven’t actually tried to seek out such an environment. But I do notice that I still do anticipate failing the original 60-hour goal due to the problem in the second paragraph.
On thinking about them:
“Having both the motivation and the mental stamina to work 60-hour weeks reliably.” Actually this probably would be “hard” rather than “impossible”. There are things I can try here that I haven’t tried that might work, so I have not yet tried enough things to declare it impossible. It’s more like I anticipate the possibility of this being impossible, as opposed to actually considering it impossible. Not a good example.
“Gaining 15+ points of IQ or the thing that IQ is measuring.”—So it seems like there are two ways this problem could go. In World A, there exists some stack of exercises and nootropics that can already let me do this without sacrificing something I’m not willing to sacrifice. In this case the problem is that of finding it—people can bullshit or lie, supplements are not a field where I expect complete honesty, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a high amount of individualism such that someone could truthfully say they gained 15+ IQ points on X, but I need Y instead to achieve the same outcome. If I had to try each combination myself I’d run out of time very quickly. It’s impossible in the sense of winning the lottery is impossible—not something I can reliably make happen, as opposed to literally can’t be done. This is close enough that I consider it to be equivalent.
Alternatively, maybe this stack just doesn’t exist at all. Nootropics and exercises will not get you there. In which case, solving the problem means making advances in cognitive science that our culture hasn’t yet figured out how to do. And it’s not clear to me how I would succeed where lots of others have failed, here—leading onto my third point, I don’t see how I have a comparative advantage in this area, and if I have to work full-time for years to get to this point it is no longer worth it, when the point is to make me more effective at solving my current chosen problem.
“Taking something that isn’t my comparative advantage and making it that way”—I can think of a bunch of actions I can take here that would let me do better than I currently am. Getting tutoring, improving my ability to learn, talking it over with more experienced practitioners, etc. The key impossibility here is that people who are better than me at this can just do this stuff too and probably already are.
Like, imagine I want to be a top mathematician since I’m convinced that’s the only skill worth knowing for alignment. I can hire a tutor (and have done so), but better mathematicians can also do this and probably have. How do you get good enough to meaningfully contribute when people exist in this field who did the IMO at 17 and can do any of the same improvements I can come up with? So, I would have to find some method that was A) Incredibly effective, enough to bring me up to par with more talented people and B) Other people are unable or unwilling to do this thing, even really talented people in the field.
Well since the point of this is that sometimes you can do impossible things, and the point is to notice the anticipation of impossibility and dig more into it, I’m still interested: what goes wrong if you tried to do this? What’s impossible and/or hard about it?
Outside of the office, I generally find it difficult to get appreciable amounts of work done. It feels like it takes a significant exertion of willpower to go from not doing a work-related task to doing one, at which point it generally becomes easier to continue with that task for a while. Performing this mental motion a few times per workday is enough for me to get close to full time hours in, but doesn’t feel enough for sixty hours. If I don’t perform this mental motion successfully, I wind up in a state of internal tension where I’m not actually putting in consistent mental effort towards solving the next problem in front of me. I do have a fix for this already—I work better in an office, where everyone around is also working.
So, the natural solution here would be “Find yourself an office type environment doing valuable work where it is entirely normal and expected for people to work these kind of hours.” This runs into the second issue, which is that on the rare occasions I have worked 10+ hours in a day, or generally pushed myself harder to try and stretch the edge of my conscientiousness, I tend to get headaches. Which are both unpleasant and also reduce my productivity, which ruins the entire point of the exercise. (The headaches are a known problem—I’m on a headache preventer that minimizes them. I could try upping the dosage, but I’ve already been told by one doctor that I should probably try not to be on this medication indefinitely.)
This also means that it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to an environment where everyone’s expected to work 60 hours, if I then don’t end up being able to do that even with the social and logistical environment set up in my favor. So it’d have to be an environment where it was both normal and expected to work 60 hours AND to work 40, AND the work was object-level valuable in my opinion, to be worth trying this experiment. This could be possible—I haven’t actually tried to seek out such an environment. But I do notice that I still do anticipate failing the original 60-hour goal due to the problem in the second paragraph.