Jisk, formerly Jacob. (And when Jacobs are locally scarce, still Jacob.)
LW has gone downhill a lot from its early days and I disapprove of most of the moderation choices but I’m still, sometimes, here.
It should be possible to easily find me from the username I use here, though not vice versa, for interview reasons.
I believe the first variant of this to be published was What Were You Thinking? by Richard Garfield, later republished as Hive Mind.
I learned this one on road trips with the competitive math team in middle school and high school.
I think unless there’s an existing community of a couple dozen in some city in China, it is too late to do this usefully in China. And I don’t think there is. Tokyo, Taipei, or Seoul, perhaps, but I don’t see great value in those.
One comment on layout/design: Lighthaven is great, but it is imperfect; tied to what you said about project space, I have noticed there are some things it is not good at. When the METAGAME conference was held there last fall, I observed that there was not much in the way of affordances for pick-up board gaming. Which is not a big problem, except that the main reason was a distinct shortage of tables. Optimizing for nooks for private conversations came at the expense of being able to sit down across a table and put some shared work project between you. This probably also would impact things like negotiations between two small ‘sides,’ where you want a little more physical distance. I imagine this will be somewhat more relevant in DC than Berkeley.
On the “Posterity X” theme: ‘Posterity Yard’? ‘Posterity Close’ (as in a dead-end street) is probably too cute. ‘Posterity Grounds’ is less cute and has some good qualities, but I think it’s probably no good without a campus.
Absolutely. I talked over a draft with @Screwtape and one of the tools he’s considered is giving warnings/judgments explicitly in terms of ‘permanent consequences’, ‘temporary consequences’, ‘less of this sort of thing but just a warning for now.’ IIUC he hasn’t tried it, but it seems promising.
I think karma loss is insufficiently specific and agentic to do the job, though. Rate limits, maybe, IDK.
Considering some specific cases would be good. Unfortunately I wrote this as consolidation of gestalt impressions over an extended period, and didn’t save any of the specific examples that inspired it (because I wasn’t planning a writeup at the time). I believe this generalizes better than you think, but it would be much better to back up that assertion.
Weakly disagree. It would be good if norms were predictable, but they won’t be; humans aren’t self-legible enough to set norms explicitly clearly enough to make it happen. You have to cut away some of the norms, and not enforce them, to get predictability, I think.
(Revisiting when my thoughts percolated into more coherent words:) You don’t get to live in the convenient world where most potential blackmailers are people with good alternative options. It’s always going to be an adversarial sample; the people who are most likely to attempt blackmail are those with the worst alternatives and the lowest costs; the ones who have little or no reputation to lose, and poor returns on their effort if it’s directed in other directions. If you can’t deter someone with minimal reputation and low value of their time from blackmailing you, your only defense against blackmail is to prevent anyone meeting that description from having information they could use to blackmail you.
I don’t see any reason to assume that Louie Helm was pursuing a rational strategy, indeed, I see enormous reasons to assume the opposite.
Do you not see how that would also reinforce my point? I don’t even know how to explain that, it’s too obvious to me. (EDIT: I thought of how to explain it and placed it in this new sibling comment.)
MIRI was not pursuing a stochastic policy that could have somehow caused him to get 10x the payout.
Reality was. He didn’t know how much money was available to be extorted, and if it was a lot, it could be quite a lot; heavy-tailed distribution.
Not a skill? IDK, like what would it mean to spend 6 months getting expert level at “cold emailing someone”?
This is the thing people mean when they say “Did you know you can just do things?” Some people can Just Do Things; just cold-email people. Just talk to the cute person at the bar. Just pitch to a VC you’re caught in an elevator with. Most people can’t. It’s often called ‘confidence’ but confidence is a skill you can train, or be talented at. Sam Altman is an expert at this skill; so are SBF and as many as five people not named Sam.
If the current version of the task description was also written by an LLM and didn’t get your review, then I apologize for hammering on it. But it says:
Writing the talk is design, rest is mostly practice (probably benefits some from management, but not load-bearing).
And by making this claim, I interpret you as predicting that there’s no shared domain between performing a stand-up set that someone else wrote for you, and giving a TED talk that someone else wrote, and GMing an adventure that someone else wrote. Between doing these three tasks, factoring out the Design cluster entirely. And that seems obviously false; there is a generalized skill domain of performance and stage presence and reading the room, possessed by politicians and actors and singers.
There is design; that is done by the speechwriters and script-writers and song-writers. And there is delivery; that is done by the guy on the spot with the mouth. Many times they are combined; singer-songwriters exist, most standup artists write their own routines, many(/most) politicians are involved in their speechwriting process. But they are separate skills. Max Martin tried to make it as a musician and mostly failed; as a songwriter he is probably the most successful there has ever been. There are many, many pop stars who couldn’t write a song to save their life and put some on their records anyway, which bombed. Politicians who are good at speechwriting are rare. On the other hand, actors who are good at politics are rare only in that very few try; the hit rate is very high.
If you believe this is not a fifth domain, why not? What is the alternate explanation?
The reason I initially insisted these were part of Management is that the initial AI categorization classed it as Physical, but that was clearly bogus, and your confidence that you hadn’t missed anything else meant I assumed you’d noticed it, but miscategorized it, rather than missed that it existed. If it’s one of these four, well, it’s clearly in the ‘people skills’ cluster, and so is Management. So assuming you weren’t missing anything, and with a large vague spot in (what I can see of) the ontology for what the Management domain contains, that’s the obvious place to argue you should have categorized it. I’m not attached to that claim; I don’t care whether this is combined with management or split out into the fifth domain. But I’m sure it’s a domain with cross-applicability.
Yeah in the latter case I would say this is maybe complicatedly blackmail, but definitely not straightforwardly blackmail (and maybe not blackmail at all). The strong nondisparagement clauses that must have been involved make that somewhat implausible to me, but I would need to know more details than I ever bothered to learn to determine how implausible and it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Of those, I’m inclined to place the value of losses for everything but legal costs as zero or near-zero. Someone who cares about their reputation in this respect is not going to go into this in the first place. Someone with a high opportunity cost, likewise. The fact that Helm tried this at all means either he was wildly irrational and undeterrable, or his value on his reputation was nil and his opportunity costs low.
Posit: He was unwell in a way that, durably, prevented him from working at anywhere near his former capacity. This is not particularly unlikely on priors. Severely depressed, something like that. Then, as first-order consequences:
His professional reputation is not worth very much to him. All portions of it that came from skill, he cannot maintain, and they will soon be gone regardless. His social reputation with startup people will soon follow it.
His opportunity cost is much lower than you’d otherwise expect.
Second-order consequence: If legal fees didn’t devour all his payout, this probably came out positive for him, and in expectation (heavy-tailed distribution) better than that.
And the fact that he bothered with it should be a large update in favor of this assumption. It might not push it fully to ‘more likely than not’ but I think it probably does.
If your numbers are right, the blackmailer came out with a reasonable rate of return on his effort. $20k for harassing someone you don’t like (I forget the details, but I understood him to have hostile personal history with several people involved) for half a year, well less than full time, is not a trivial reward. $60k is a pretty solid hourly rate, especially if he was not really in shape to work at the same salary as before, which on priors for someone who does something like this is very very likely.
If your when-healthy market salary is $200k, but you’re not healthy, so you can only get $120k/year from a job you can get and keep? And you get EV $30k from 15 hours a week of harassment for 6-9 months? That’s about your market rate! You’d do better than that working freelance but not that much better, and under many theories of being angry and unwell this is an easier ‘job’ to keep.
Perhaps your ontology is right, but I don’t understand what the management ontology is, if it doesn’t include this; none of your examples at the end cover it, and you haven’t said in the comments either AFAICT.
And I’m very sure that labeling things as “just practice” is a sign that the ontology is incomplete; maybe the category I’m describing is separate from management, but there is a category, a shared skill that applies at least as much as the categories you’re drawing here. When you say
Now, am I confident I have seen all skills there are in the world, such that no additional cluster will arise? Actually, yeah, kind of.
And then include several example tasks that break your assumption, within your post itself, that is a point that demands to be considered.
No. They paid a relatively small sum of money for a lunatic who had been harassing them and fraudulently pretending to be them and calling the police on their houses at random hours of the night to finally shut up and go away (after 6+ months of it).
That’s still giving into blackmail. Much like a settlement that allows an aggressor to not admit wrongdoing is giving into blackmail. Sometimes you, as a practical matter, have to give in to blackmail, if you’re acting with people too irrational to be deterred by predictably not giving in. Sometimes you have not had the opportunity to demonstrate it and do not believe you will have cause to have publicly demonstrated it in the future, and so the pragmatic case says ‘Sure, give in, the cross-time coalition of my selves agrees that it’s not worth it to refuse.’
But I think it does say something negative. They were, then, an organization which was paying a great deal of attention to optimal timeless decision theory that prescribe being shaped across time to be the sort of thing that cannot be usefully blackmailed because it predictably does not give in to it. And when it came to the practical case where they could implement that policy… they gave in. It’s not great to fail to take your beliefs seriously, and this chain of events suggests that they did not. But that’s a venial sin. The extenuating circumstances were significant, and the blackmailer plausibly undeterrable even if they had been predictably unexploitable.
In other words, the substance of the accusation was correct; it was the volume and vehemence of it which was disproportionate and unjustified. (And I still wouldn’t call it morally wrong; that came later.)
Okay, now these say
Writing the talk is design, rest is mostly practice (probably benefits some from management, but not load-bearing).
Writing the set is design, rest is mostly practice (also probably benefits from management some, and if it’s long enough it might actually tax your physical stamina, but seems very unlikely to be a blocker).
And I think that “the rest is mostly practice” is inherently never the right answer. Learning to juggle three balls is mostly practice. I’m pretty shit at physical skills, but I can (once did) learn to juggle three balls for thirty seconds or so in fifty hours or so. Still, just about anyone can get it to last five seconds in under an hour. Someone who’s good at physical skills can get up to thirty seconds in five hours or less, though, an OOM faster than me, because it’s part of that skill category and their practice is an OOM more effective than me. So it is with everything; to a first approximation there is nothing that is “just practice.” Useful practice is a matter of skill.
In particular, the thing you are practicing is not ‘deliver it perfectly.’ That’s not a thing, there is no perfectly. You are practicing ‘How does this actually come out? How will people perceive this?’ ‘How will that affect them? Is that the effect I want?’ Performance is a skill, delivery is a skill, and it’s very centrally the skill that managers and politicians possess, not one that UX designers and poets and contract lawyers share. The same subskills you use to predict the aggregate response of an audience are used in predicting how to manage firing someone in a way that is humane. Crowd dynamics are somewhat different from single people; a single person you know well can be predicted nearly flawlessly, if you’re really really good, and a crowd you can even at best predict the average aggregate and narrow your intuitive distribution (usually fairly small error bars but fat-tailed) for how likely it is to land far from that. But that’s less different than poetry is from a legal defense or good commit messages.
And the case for DMing a game is even stronger. You have six people to track and manage, or less (unless you have made some unwise decisions). That’s few enough people that a talented manager can model their individual likes and dislikes and what will keep them interested, motivated, and inclined to stay on task, without resorting to aggregates. It is a very small, intimate performance, and performance is a skill closely tied into management. You can’t manage without at least 20% of the performer’s skillset, and someone who can perform (and isn’t a diva) has a far, far easier time learning to manage people than someone whose background is in biology or construction, and somewhat easier than a poet. Because it’s about people and their perceptions and reading the room.
And same for stand-up? The thing about managing people is it’s primarily about controlling appearances and making sure they’re (honest but also) satisfying to the people managed.
I am unsurprised it was deliberate, though a little surprised that it was ‘actively avoiding’ rather than ‘not valuing highly.’ And by the specifics, for which, hmm, I’m somewhat skeptical. I’m not sure I buy the switching costs argument. IME, the fire pit clusters are significantly higher switching costs to leave than the tables, and tend to support conversation sizes in the 6-10 range, where the two clusters of picnic tables are better for 3-6. Maybe that’s true, but worth it for other benefits of the fire pits? (Coziness, informality, warmth, etc.) Seems plausible. I think my personal conversation quality has been higher at the tables and pits than elsewhere but that’s pretty idiosyncratic.
Setting that aside and taking the aversion to tables as well-founded and worth treating as an axiom: I think there’s other ways to set up spaces for “2-4 ‘vs.’ 2-4” conversations that don’t need tables, though it might require more special-purpose furniture. The sheds (1, 2) around Bayes are a good starting point. I might look to make some which are narrower, taller, and have a rail down the center to lean on, for ‘stand-up’ conversations; making some of these in/just-off the main social space, but smaller (1-2 per side) and also sound-insulated like a coworking video-call booth also feels promising. A table that can tilt to be flat, but doesn’t have anything that can lock it flat, is probably too cute as an idea, especially since done unskillfully it might just feel broken, but I think worth prototyping.
I’ll also flag ‘just use a whiteboard’ as a fairly Silicon-Valley-coded solution. If that’s slightly greyed-out as an option in the target culture, that’s an issue. I’m sure that’s not prohibitive in DC, and it may be sufficiently universal at this point this isn’t an issue at all, but it’s worth checking the assumption. If it’s an issue, another method that might work without tables you can set things down on would be slanted tables with thin lips at the lower side—drafting desk style. That could work well with nooks like the one just below Glass Hall across from Eigen. (img) Potentially dual-sided variants (peaked in the center) could work as well. Deliberate use of screens on arms, like in the Gazebo of Schemes and the fire pit at the back of Aumann, might also sub in.