The bar is lower than you think
TL;DR: The efficient market hypothesis is a lie, there are no adults, you don’t have to be as cool as the Very Cool People to contribute something, your comparative advantage tends to feel like just doing the obvious thing, and low hanging fruit is everywhere if you pay attention. The Very Cool People are anyways not so impossible to become; and perhaps most coolness is gated behind a self belief of having nothing to add. So put more out into the world, worry less about whether people already know or find it boring. At worst you’ll be slightly annoying. How can you know, if you haven’t even tried?
Apparently I live in the Iron Man timeline, so I asked Jarvis/Claude to make this and I got to see it get assembled piece by piece. In the words of Claude, “you have now witnessed art”.[1]
Recently I’ve been commenting more on LessWrong[2]. This place is somehow the best[3] forum for sane reasoned discussion on the internet besides small academic-gated communities. A lot of posts and comments seem impressive, the product of minds greater than my own, the same way that even if I tried for years I probably wouldn’t write a novel better than my own favorites[4] or beat Terrence Tao at his own game.
But… even taking for granted the (false) conclusion that all good posters here are unattainably beyond yourself, you just… don’t need to be that good to have something to contribute. It’s typically easier to notice that step 24 of an argument is fatally flawed than it is to come up with it, especially if you can read a dozen arguments and then only comment on the one you can find flaws in. Sometimes your life has given you evidence that others don’t have, or you happened to hear a phrase from a friend that is apt. Sometimes people have good ideas or know a lot but cannot explain them.
Furthermore, frequently people systematically underestimate how good they are at their greatest strengths. When you have unusual skill in a domain, that domain will feel unusually easy. Thus, Focus on the places where everyone else is dropping the ball.
Personally I’ve found that having the mindset that you can fix things or contribute makes you notice when you can. It’s like the frequency illusion. For example, the next time you’re reading Wikipedia and get a twinge of “that’s phrased poorly” or “that’s a typo” or “why doesn’t this mention X?”, think “I could fix that, right now”. You are allowed to edit Wikipedia. Similarly, comment with your addition.
What if that would take too much effort? Well… consider just half-assing it. That often gets you 80% of the way, and you shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can always go back to put your full ass in it later. You think I’m proof reading this post? Hell no! I only added the image hours later. See the examples list for more.
What’s the worst that could happen? You annoy a few people a little, some are a bit angry at you, maybe you mislead them (at least until someone deletes your text or comments about how wrong you are), you look a little lamer to the Cool Kids, and you lose some internet points.
Boo-hoo?[5] If you never take the risk of making people a little sad or annoyed or dumber, you’ll never do much of anything anyways. I try to have life goals not best satisfied by a literal corpse. There are times and places to shy away from inaction due to the risk of causing harm but internet commenting just doesn’t risk much harm to others.[6]
Now for examples, taken from my most upvoted comments, mostly in order to prevent cherry picking (currently I mostly write comments):
Bask in awe at my greatness[7], and realize that you might be in the same epistemic state that I was before I made these comments, and that most of these did not feel like ‘effort posts’, and I almost didn’t do half of them due to thinking nobody would care. If you think mine are too impressive for you to replicate, this should make you wonder how you know you aren’t in the same position. If you think mine are meh or trash, then you should have no problem beating me.[8]
Best Comments
My most upvoted comment is basically just a copy paste from a couple prediction market’s about-me’s, a regurgitation of something I read Hanson say, a quote from an ACX post, and a link to a paper I didn’t even read beyond skimming the intro that was linked in one of the previous sources. It feels like I’m just being a proactive google or LLM (minus slop) here
My second most upvoted comment was me noticing that a fermi estimate used the total surface area of the Earth when they wanted the land area. I had the ballpark figure for the total in my recognition memory so it pinged my spidey-sense, and I knew the circumference of the Earth from memory (the French used to define the meter as a ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, so the circumference is 40k km), so I could do the check in my head while filling my water bottle (or something like that).
My third most upvoted comment is an explanation of why I loved a certain explanation of Shapley values with Venn diagrams. This was actually an effort-post—I had to think for a while about what makes for good math explanations and why I felt so fond of this one, and I think I came away with a picture that isn’t the usual story.[9]
My fourth most upvoted comment was written off the cuff in my bed, and I almost didn’t post it because I thought nobody would care. I thought it would be like expecting people to care about my diary or about my dreams.
[skipping two entries: an old post I don’t really like that I wrote too long ago to remember anything about, a basically-poem that I like more than others did], My seventh most upvoted comment was just a simple clarification of someone’s misunderstanding, where the domain knowledge about lockpicking is mentioned pretty early by basically anyone that talks about lockpicking to a general audience (don’t pick locks you don’t own because you might damage them).
My eight most upvoted comment was me pointing one of those people I think of as Very Cool to a certain linguistics research domain. The one time I took a linguistics class I watched none of the lectures and just ad libbed all of the assignments. I only know what a word learning bias is because it was in one of a series of ~10 minute YouTube videos covering intro level linguistics. Believe it or not, even smart people don’t literally know everything.
Maybe you’ve heard most of this stuff before. I had. Maybe this time, you’ll finally listen.
- ^
It rolled the arrogant rude annoyed teenager tone as specified in my user preferences prompt.
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And less recently, Wikipedia. Same principles apply—you know you can just take snippets of non-Wikipedia stuff you read and put them on there, from as simple as “Disease X killed Y people in [recent year] according to the WHO” to updating said stats when time inexorably advances, to putting in lightly reformulated math or physics equations from papers or standard books like the Feynmann lectures or easy nice consequences of what’s already on there. You may even get an ego boost when you look something up on Wikipedia and realize you wrote the text you are reading.
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Read: The worst form of forum, except for all the other fora we’ve tried.
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For fiction, the loophole I plan to exploit someday is that I only need to write something perfect for me or people like me, and I can just ask myself what I like.
- ^
I don’t mean to trivialize your sadness if you’ve been harmed. I just mean that there’s a thing that some people are more prone to than others where they overinflate/catastrophize minor or unlikely downsides, and often pointing out how silly the worries are helps dissolve them.
- ^
You can use a pseudonym and hide revealing information if you’re worried about that. Here I was mostly talking about harm to others.
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In case you missed it I am playing up my ego for the lols.
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Unless you also think that LW is deeply flawed about what it rewards
- ^
Thanks to the people who downvoted my previous super short “Wow that’s great!” comments—I may not have written that had you not kicked me to elaborate.
I think there’s a wide gap between being a commenter and being “one of the cool kids”. Pretty much everyone who’s casually used AskReddit at any point from 2008-2020 (I think it’s almost all bots now) has gotten a comment or two with 1k upvotes. You could extend the 90-9-1 Rule with an addition that, of the one percent who create OC, 90 percent produce one or two things that go largely unnoticed, 9 percent create a few ‘hits’ but attain no recognition, and the remaining 1 percent become cultural figures of some influence, if not to the point of name recognition.
For example, I created a popular meme image in the late 2010′s that I’ve seen propagating around the ‘normie’ internet every few years since, with a good amount of attention. That’d put me in the top 0.1 percent for internet cultural influence, and it is nonetheless true that I’m a rounding error compared to the .01 percent that produce the other 90 percent of internet culture.
I think it used to be less skewed, though. Back when every major social media site was in the “free speech wing of the free speech party”, ideas could quickly propagate between platforms, there was no chilling effect on new ideas, and ordinary people who don’t dedicate their lives to e-fame could make more of a difference in the internet’s cultural landscape.
I think my post still applies to regularly putting out post-level hits. The bar is higher, but still lower than most think.
I think my sense of coolness more (relative to other people’s senses) closely tracks what I actually value as opposed to popularity, and I feel like LessWrong’s popularity is a good proxy for my sense of coolness.
They are unattainably beyond you because, on the default trajectory, you will not attain “being like them”, so you need to change your trajectory to attain it.[1]
Or, to speak more plainly, people overindex on what they are/can at the moment vs what they can learn/become.
To be clear, I don’t want to strongly frame it in terms of “trying to become one of the cool kids”, as is not a motivation/goal I endorse, especially in the long run.
I’ll argue for “the cool kids” as motivation (well, at least for people like me) in a post that I plan to write later. I invite you to argue in the comments of that if/when it gets written!
Though yeah, I perhaps should’ve tied it to a plurality of motivational hooks, even if I’m extra fond of one of them.
I struggle a lot trying to figure out what I want to say, or if it’s even appropriate for me to say. But I guess I’ll say it, since you are saying it’s good to do.
I think the bar is too high for what I want to do. I want to contribute to AI x-risk reduction somehow. Ideally, I’d do this in some kind of a role. I have pretty awful productivity unemployed, and without some kind of meaningful/costly signal from others that my output actually matters, I default to thinking anything I do doesn’t matter.
But when I go look at the people that are actually out there doing things that matter, they are all way better than me. I’ve looked at the backgrounds of dozens of them by this point. It’s generally at least one of:
-Top tier university graduate (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, etc.)
-Started a PhD
-Self-taught six figure programmer
-Started a business
-Some kind of amazing autodidact in other ways
And all this by the time they are 25, 30 at the latest. Even the people getting entry-level ops roles at Constellation are fresh private liberal arts college grads.
I don’t have any of that. I’m half-assing my third try to get a degree at a third-tier online school at 30, and the degree (CS) will probably be obsolete soon anyways. I don’t have any applicable work experience. I don’t have any notable talents or knowledge.
So to get a role, or to get costly signals that what I do matters, and that I’m worth investing in (even if it’s just me investing in myself), and hence be able to try to help stop the end of the world, it seems like I’d have to fulfill one of those criteria—You Must Be This Tall To Ride. And I am not tall enough.
I plan to move to the Bay Area in a few months. Live in a closet, or something, to make it work on my savings, or be homeless if I have to. Try to find anything at all I can do to help.
But even being there, it’s hard for me to imagine what I could do. It would take several years for me to get good enough at technical alignment to hope to do anything meaningful, and that’s assuming it wouldn’t just serve as safetywashing for the AI race. Governance requires a degree, a lot of background knowledge and skill, and also tends to require being an elite. I could… post on LW? Talk to people? Organize? Protest? My generally low capabilities would seem to indicate I wouldn’t be impactful at those on the margin, and it wouldn’t lead to a role. I don’t know what else I can do that doesn’t seem to amount to “bootstrap yourself into an agentic, autodidactic elite.”
Hopefully I am wrong about all this, and all I am missing is a supportive environment of in-person like-minded peers and networking opportunities in order to do something. Or maybe my model of the world is deeply flawed in some way. I am depressed, so maybe my mind will change after I get electroconvulsive therapy. Maybe I’ve been confirmation-biasing myself into believing that it’s all just elites? Or there’s been some other selection effect going on in what I see vs. what is real? I hope so.
Thank you for writing the post, it must have been pretty tough to write that all down. First and foremost, I want to encourage you to think about financial sustainability when considering moving to the bay. Personal growth and learning complex technical topics are energy-intensive and expensive activities (in terms of time and attention), and being constantly short on money and resources will not make either easier. My own experiences with mental health in the past showed me that doing good research gets exponentially harder if I can’t manage my own situation first.
With regards to your concerns about not learning fast enough/having enough skills to contribute to AI safety or related problems, I have several thoughts. First of all, while it may be true that you have limited skills in “traditional” technical research, that doesn’t mean that you therefore have to work to fit yourself into that mould. Right now I see a lot of people who are interested in AI safety taking the same correlated bets (moving to bay area, specialising into ML/technical AI research, joining a lab or an AI safety startup, relying heavily on Claude to accelerate progress), and overall I think this is quite a narrow minded angle with which to address a literally global problem. For example, even if MIRI secures its landmark policy goal (an international treaty to pause AI development), that still means that the US government is one of the two or three linchpins in ensuring that the treaty is carried out safely and competently. Thus local governance and campaigning for the ’26 and ’28 election seasons would be very important to shape who is in power at critical turning points. Being a non-US citizen, I have limited context here, but if you are American then this is something you have a unique power to shape. There are other similar opportunities here but I will not go on endlessly.
Finally, I want to push back a little against the idea of the “agentic, autodidactic elite” and the implied “plebs/NPCs/normies”. IMO most of what is called “agentic” is risk taking combined with leverage (e.g. pre-existing connections, resources etc.). As you said yourself many of the hotshots in this community already had some degree of backing, attended elite institutions etc., so its not really a case of “those with the will succeed and those without do not”. Insofar as people can grow and attain better skills, it is hard to do so when we constantly see ourselves as inferior to the titans and giants (although tbh I feel that way most of the time as well, I have to work quite hard to suppress that circuit in my brain). I hope that this helps somewhat and I hope that you can find firmer footing in your near future!
Well, you make good points about the Bay… it would be kinda hard to make the money work (though I’ve dealt with privation before), and it would be a correlated bet… I think part of why I want to be there, is to have any sort of like-minded community at all, instead of mouldering in my house all day, every day. I am highly motivated by other people.
I do think you’re right that technical research is not really the right path. There’s too much investment in that, compared to advocacy.
I am an American, but it’s hard to see a theory of change that actually routes through me? I can… vote, call my Congressperson, show up to protests… I’m going to PauseCon in DC, but I don’t see how that leads to a sustainable trajectory of change, including one that hopefully could get me paid. I am not skilled or resourced enough, I think, to go organizing all on my own, and I don’t have anywhere near the credentials to be an AI safety lobbyist or an assistant to one, not that there’s much funding for that in the US anyways. Unless you propose I move to a swing state and district specifically to influence the representative there...?
I am curious about the other opportunities you have in mind.
A lot of elites have impostor syndrome. You’re an elite, you went to Cambridge. I saw an article on EA Forum where someone said they weren’t good enough because they “weren’t in the top half of Oxford.” As someone who is, I’m pretty sure, an actual impostor (outside of being in intellectual sync with LW and the like), this is rather frustrating to listen to. You have the credentials, accomplishments, and connections to back up your ambitions, and the talent and family background to have gotten to where you are in the first place, and I do not. I don’t see how I can grow when I don’t have that kind of wealth.
I’ll send you a DM!
I find it likely that you are overestimating the difficulty of doing this. However, given that you said you’re depressed, you probably do have a harder time that most people would. So, maybe first focus you energies on getting creative about not being depressed. You mentioned electroconvulsive therapy, which makes me think you’ve already tried a bunch of easier stuff, but just in case something here is new: standard drugs (get advice from doctors, from reddit, from forums like this), unstandard drugs (no comment about breaking laws), treatments (light therapy? electroconvulsive as mentioned. transcranial magnetic stimulation?), therapies (I hear CBT is unusually good, and also that you should shop around for a good therapist and follow your gut if it feels like it one isn’t working), and scene changes (you mentioned moving cities—presumably you’ve done encouraging-friend filtering where you already are).
I think that reading someone else’s research program and then trying to tackle a relatively small unit of their open problems is the way to go, but some probably disagree, and considering that I haven’t succeeded at doing this yet I am not confident. I think the people who disagree would recommend that you think about the problem by yourself for a while, and then follow your queries and ideas where they lead you.
Personally, looking at agent foundations work made me go “Oh Cthulhu, look at this low hanging fruit, even I might me able to do this, why aren’t all the people-much-better-than-me already doing this?”
I think it’s possible that getting yourself to just… really feel a drive to do something, enough to make you work on it regularly, would be a sufficient superpower. If you are depressed, I would guess you have problems doing that. I also have some severe problems in that department, working on it.
I do not know how fast it would take for someone that isn’t me to learn the prerequisite math (up to the level that just trying the problem is a better use of time then tackling prerequisites). Personally I feel that if you spent a couple hours every day, then you could probably solve some minor problem or win a bounty after a couple years. I’m not sure whether I’m failing to account properly for you learning being slower than me.
As an example: how much background does someone need to have a shot at solving this bounty problem (cherry picked for background and concreteness)? I feel like I originally learnt most of the prerequisites from the information theory in the sequences and, like, seeing the definition of the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the intuition that it’s like extra bits after compression compared to perfect compression. There’s the less legible background of “mathematical maturity”, which I don’t actually know how to train besides saying “try learning some rigorous math for a while, doesn’t really matter which, and then hope you get the skill of how to learn and do math”. I’m thinking the sort of thing that lets you have something to do when you see a math problem you don’t know how to solve in front of you. I think math competition problems (which shoot for low prerequisite) for gradeschoolers train parts of this well, but perhaps you’ll just be better served picking it up while trying to learn a useful prerequisite?
Okay, I’m reading your post on light glasses (I like it!) and I think you should think that if you can gather the knowledge needed to write that post, and then go and do the things you wrote up, and then write it up, then you have demonstrated ‘smart and agentic’ capability, and I suggest that the various AI x-risk contribution paths ‘only’ require you to do something like that, but more often.
Thank you for your reply! I’ll respond to both comments here.
>I find it likely that you are overestimating the difficulty of doing this.
Could you make an argument for this? I have a hard time understanding this perspective. I don’t think most people can just become agentic autodidactic elites if they want to?
>getting creative about depression
I have heard of all of these, yes. I’ve tried a few legal drugs, I don’t plan on taking illegal drugs, multiple therapists haven’t worked, I already do light therapy for other reasons as you noticed, if I’m going to do TMS I may as well do ECT, and part of my motivation for moving to the Bay is to have an in-person community I feel like I could belong in.
>research problems
I don’t think technical safety research is a particularly impactful thing to do. That would be a bet that solving every aspect of x-risk relevant AI safety can happen before the frontier labs get to AGI with mere product safety, and that doesn’t seem like a very good bet. It would, as you note, take at least a couple years to make even the smallest contribution in the first place.
I don’t believe in myself enough (I don’t have academic connections, or a large body of internalized knowledge, etc.) to think that going off in my own direction would work very well either.
>math
I do not understand any of that bounty. I did not read much of the Sequences, and I don’t have the math chops to understand the more mathier ones. Perhaps if I went and studied math for a while I would, but, is that the best use of my time, compared to e.g. trying to figure out a way to do AI safety advocacy?
>post on light glasses
Thank you : ) Most of that knowledge was not my own, it was from the VLiDACMel document, whose author actually did the research. I just implemented it in my particular case—being highly motivated to do so to fix my sleep—and then wrote up the resulting protocol, and gave some easily googleable context about the nature of sleep and related products?
The motivation to write it came from a bunch of people telling me in person they’d read an article about the light glasses if I wrote it. That is, I got a clear external signal that my output mattered. But to be in the kind of situation where I could get signals like that for AI safety, I have to first be accomplished enough for people to notice and push on me. And I didn’t get accomplishments from my background, and to make new accomplishments, I have to get an external signal… it’s a catch-22. Hence why I am skeptical of my ability to bootstrap.
(only currently replying to a couple subpoints)
I spoke of that because it’s the only thing I’ve looked into at all. I suspect the lesson is generalizable to, say, technical governance or politicking (which it sounded like you think are more useful). As an example: if you live near a college, I would consider showing up to the relevant shelling point location with a plastic chair, plastic table, and whiteboard that says something like “I think superintelligent AI will kill us all, and we need to stop development immediately—Change My Mind”. e.g. my campus has a place where people tend to show up to argue about abortion or religion or whatever (though usually one of those two...)
This sure sounds like what someone with some special capabilities would say? Plenty of (imo unusually smart and hard working!) people I know would think “impressive, I couldn’t do that—where would I even start?”. I kinda feel that way too, I suspect that if I was in your shoes I wouldn’t have ended up thinking to do that, or doing it as well.
>depression
Yeah, it looked like you were being pretty reasonable in trying to fix that. I’d still say to keep pushing even when it feels like you’ve exhausted everything, but you probably have already heard this or already do that. I still think the approach is a good one.
Are you saying the bar is lower than we think for stuff like like… winning karma on lesswrong? (I agree for publishing content in public most people, including myself, probably should just go for it more)
Or are you also saying the bar is lower than we think for really hard things as well like making a scientific breakthrough or getting elected to your county’s parliament or making 100 million dollars?
You probably won’t make an important scientific breakthrough or get elected to parliament or make $100 M, but I think most probably imagine that the bar is higher than it is. I think they’re semiconsciously acting like the people that can were given a big neon sign that says Destined For Cool.
Instead I usually see the cool people say “I dunno man, I thought ‘why the hell is nobody doing this?’, wasted way too long thinking that it must be too hard for me, then finally starting trying to do it, and then it like… worked? Then for some reason people started calling me, certified idiot, a genius?”.
I now think there’s a fair (still <50%, maybe <25%, but I’m poorly calibrated) chance that I could make an important scientific breakthrough if I made trying a full-time job. I’m special in some ways but I’m still waiting on my Hogwarts acceptance letter.
I suspect that the same principles apply to all sorts of harder things, though the bar is no longer so low. Especially if you are reading this web forum. There’s a common skill of like… realizing that you, yes you, can just do things, that you can turn your fantasies into realities by actually planning. To some extent cool people are kinda innately special, but many others just don’t think to try because they feel that they are not blessed with the ability to be cool. We feel all our own struggles, see every one of our mistakes, all the failed paths and time spent throwing mud at a wall. The typical mind fallacy means we find that our own point of view (being the one that generates most of your experiences) is common and thus can’t contribute anything.
I think it’s worth clarifying—what were these acomplishments? Were they easy things or hard things? If they are genuinely hard things then this is a very interesting observation.
I totally buy that someone might have a weird idea for a party game that they were scared to try—but then they tried anyway and it killed. I totally buy that the only thing standing in the way of us writing a decent blog post or cooking a delicious meal could be not realising how low the bar is.
But I don’t think this insight generalizes well to difficult endevours. For something really hard which requires sustained commitment and sacrifice in order to pull off—the initial push to “just go for it” is only a tiny component of the total investment required.
Even for things that are only a little bit difficult, but require sustained effort—like losing weight without drugs—almost everyone overweight attempts this and most don’t succeed. The bar was higher than they thought. When you say “I have a ~25% chance of making a great scientific discovery if I made it my full time job” that’s meaningless conditional if you’re not actually capable of willing yourself to devote your life to it. It’s akin to the observation “I’d have a 99+% chance of achieving an amazing physique if I exercised and dieted better”
For a really ambitious goal like building a billion dollar buisness or winning a Grammy Award—my impression is the bar is higher than people think and I don’t think people should try it more!
My crappy title for the version of this post I’d agree with would be “the bar height as a function of your goal has a lot more variance than you think”. Easy things are easier than we think, hard things are harder
Specifics are not coming to mind at the moment but:
iirc the CEO of Lumina Probiotic (the bacteria that’s supposed to stop cavities) said something similar on The Filan Cabinet (Daniel Filan is the AXRP guy, among other things). Something like “I was reading random biology articles with my girlfriend, as you do, and then saw this one about the doctor who originally made the bacteria, and was like ‘wait why isn’t this just sold everwhere’ and then was like ‘wait i have some of the necessary skills? it doesn’t even seem that hard?’”). Unless I fucked up application, I should have his bacteria in my teeth. I think that’s pretty impressive.
Feynmann once said “what one fool can learn, so can another”. I don’t know how much he was like, semiconsciously performatively playing it up to try to be more approachable or to get people to stop getting in their own way of learning by assuming they weren’t smart enough.
Knowing what I read I just… kinda expect my impression of having read others saying similar was due to me having read such reports from other similar examples of famous scientists or startup founders.
I recall hearing prominent YouTubers and LessWrongers and that one famous study on photography and ceramics classes that volume of output matters more, seemingly because you learn a lot from doing it a bunch with quick feedback loops, and also because you don’t really know what will just go viral for inexplicable reasons (at least until you get enough skill to play the game better, seemingly). This is semirelated, but I suspect that you have to mentally stop thinking that each creation must merit a Great Effort from you in order to be successful.
Do you have any thoughts on what this principle would look like when applied to the problem of unemployment?
To vaguely gesture at the kind of thing I’m imagining: “You don’t need a perfect resume to start taking steps towards landing a job you’ll like. You can just do X, which will bring you in contact with people in that field, and if you then do Y… which leads to Z...”
To put a more concrete framing around it, do you think it would be possible for someone so inclined to write a set of instructions (e.g. in a blog post) that:
if followed, would lead to employment in > 80% of cases in < 100 days
were simple enough that most healthy adults could understand and execute them if they wanted?
(You can adjust the numbers and other specifics if you like.)
For this thought experiment, entrepreneurship, self-employment, gigs, etc. count as employment if the income exceeds, or is on a trajectory to exceed, unemployment benefits.
This problem has been on my mind a lot lately, with unemployment rates persistently high and still rising in Finland. I’m fortunate in that I’ve not been personally affected (and feel confident I could find a new job if it came to that), but the whole situation is just a colossal waste.
I think the stable list of instructions that you desire does not exist because your country’s economy is limited by something that is not human capital. Since there are more job seekers than open positions within your country’s economy, the job market is zero sum and any advice will inevitably become less useful as it spread. This zero-sumness makes a stable list of instructions the average person could follow to get a job impossible.
For there to be no stable list of instructions, there must be empirical evidence in favor of a zero sum job market, something that emerges during a labor surplus. I believe the unemployment rate is explanatory because high unemployment is strong evidence for a large amount of unused human capital. An unskilled labor shortage is incompatible with a high unemployment rate since the unemployed would rapidly be hired until full employment is achieved. If instead, a skilled labor shortage was the issue, Finland’s companies (or its government) would use some of their profits to create successful training programs that turn the average unemployed person into skilled workers. This would cause unemployment to fall. To my knowledge, neither of these things is happening in Finland. Therefore, Finland has a labor surplus, rendering the job market zero sum. And with a zero sum job market, the main effect of spreading effective advice about how to get a job is that the effort required to find a job increases.
As for the existence of an unstable set of instructions the average person in Western countries could follow to get a job, I don’t know if such a list exists due to how good advice similar to what XelaP has provided has spread. The amount of effort required to find a job might be beyond what an average person is consistently capable of, especially if one lacks the necessary personal connections. The only advice I have that could be useful to give is this: should you become unemployed, look for organizations that are genuinely hiring and apply there instead of wasting time with organizations that are pretending to hire to signal something to someone.
I certainly agree that one of the many effects would be increased competition for existing job opportunities. But wouldn’t more effective job-seeking also result in a more effective allocation of labour? And since capital can be reallocated, both within the country and across borders, wouldn’t this in principle unlock the possibility of full employment?
I think that the skillset required to quickly get hired does not necessarily overlap with the set of skills required to be an effective worker when on the job. Furthermore, I think one’s ability to learn how to find a job may not correlate particularly well with one’s ability to perform while on the job. As a result, I believe that in an environment where the job search is intense, the people who get hired might not be the people who should be hired if your goal was to more effectively allocate labor.
Still, if “getting hired quickly” and “will do a good job” are strongly correlated, then a more competitive hiring process will lead to a more efficient allocation of labor, leading to a stronger economy. I don’t think this would full employment unless the gains created by more efficiently allocating labor are large. If these conditions are empirically met, then we agree that more effective job seeking could in principle lead to full employment.
I’ll admit that I’ve never had a job aside from like, tutoring at a school that I was a student of. Secondly I have no instructions that most healthy adults would actually (in an intent to treat sense) find turn them into employees with houses and stable finances. “If they wanted” is doing a bunch of legwork here—what counts? If you actually follow the instructions, there are loads of things you could do—I really think way more people could learn to code up to a basic ability if they actually worked on it for a couple hours every day. I understand not doing this—I myself have pretty bad problems with doing any unpleasant cognitive task.
Regardless, these principles suggest some more unusual advice, some which I think a normal person could hear a friend tell them, follow, and then get good results. Not like magic results, but good.
Unfortunately I think the main skill being used here is “summon creative problem solving”. I think ordinary people can do this: If you can brainstorm what Light Yagami should do next or whether Batman could guide a tortoise across the U.S. during a zombie apocalypse, then what’s stopping you from brainstorming what John Smith should do next given that he has prep time, is ‘joblusted’, has X preexisting abilities and Y debuffs, etc.
Anyways, here’s my list. If I end up needing a job and not trying to play to my unusual domain abilities (e.g. if that just doesn’t pan out) this is some of what I’d hope to do:
Cold email people with your resume or an adapted version of it explaining why you’re a good fit. I’ve heard people succeed by doing this but idk how generalizable this strategy is. Possibly this stopped working after LLM led to much more spam everywhere.
Cold talk to people in your network.
Tell people you know that you want a job in X and have Y skills, in case they forward you along to some girlfriend’s uncle’s daughter.
Make a list of common skilled careers, apply some prioritization criteria like “some of these are easier to get a job with only the skill but not a credential” or “some of these are easier to get quick credentials after the fact”, try them out and see how fast you pick them up. Specifics: programming, electricianing, plumbing, carpentry, construction work, car maintenance, basic nurse skills, emt skills. If you need help writing the list try things like indeed + LLMs.
Factor out subskills of the above stuff and attack those.
Make a list of convergent general skills and try the above but for them. Specifics: touch typing, writing in the prestige dialect of wherever you are, learning English (yes yes I know, but famous hacker (his software is iirc probably running on my laptop?) Eric S. Raymond once said non-native speakers also say you should really do this), getting even gooder at English (speed + accent + colloquialisms?), being able to do algebra, financial literacy, how to drive a car (more useful in America), computer literacy (do you know what a file is? can you convert a png to a jpg? can you take a screenshot? search for all emails from Bob?), how to learn (I’d say “try reading textbooks, which you can get for free either from professor websites or illegally through means I would totally never endorse like Anna’s Archive, or just a library” but some people benefit more from video lectures, or following the schedule and content of e.g. MIT’s open courses. More unusual recc is Anki or other spaced repetition software (this link is a much more memorable but much less informative explainer)
Thanks, that’s a great list. Honestly, even just using Claude as a sparring partner to work through those points would probably be a major level-up for the average job search.
I like this framing and will try it on myself. (Not for job search currently but for other things.)
I think we have vastly different models of employment and economics. If everyone trained a skill (like carpentry or electricianing) or applied creativity to their life problems, I expect GDP to go up (proportional to how much change happened) and with it employment and standard of living. If I could magically get every Fin to suddenly start living their life that way I expect that you’d be able to see it in the econimic statistics.
Topic for further analysis: the merit bar and the attention bar are different things.
That sounds interesting; please elaborate?
Love the vibe and agree in general.