The times I was able to get people to do things that they felt were too unlikely to commit to were largely about lowering the emotional costs of failure. The context is a bit different, but it seems likely that some of the same factors apply.
Using “writing HPMoR” as an example, there’s more than one thing failure could be taken to mean. One is “I tested a high risk high reward idea, and it didn’t pan out. I learned something useful about what kinds of things I can’t do (right away, at least), and it still strikes me as having been worth attempting, given what I knew at the time. If I keep trying high risk high reward ideas one of them is likely to pay out, because the idea that I’m limited by what social expectations would see as “modest” isn’t even worth taking seriously”. A completely different thing it could mean is “I was arrogant to think I had a chance at this. I learned nothing on the object level because I already knew I couldn’t do it, but on the meta level I learned that I was wrong to set this aside and hope. In hindsight, it was a mistake that never was worth trying in the first place, and if I keep trying high risk high rewards things I’m just going to keep failing because social expectations of what I’m capable of are *right*”. The people with the latter anticipation are going to be less thrilled about flipping that coin with a 50% chance of success because the other 50% hurts a lot more.
The former mindset *sounds* a lot better, and people are going to want to say “yeah, that one sounds right! I believe *that* one!” even when their private thoughts tend towards the latter mindset. If you try to get someone in the latter category to act like they’re in the former category, you’re going to run into motivation problems. You’re going to hear “You’re right, and I want to… I just can’t find the motivation”.
In order to get people to shift from “failure means I should be less confident and try less” to “failure means this particular one didn’t pan out, and it’s still worth trying more”, you have to be able to engage with (and pass the ‘ideological turing test’ of) their impulses to take failure as indicative of a larger problem. There is definitely a skill to this, and it can be tough when you can plainly see that the right answer is to “just try it”. At the same time, it’s a skill that can be learned and it does work for opening things up for change.
I think your main point here is wrong.
Your analysis rests on a lot of assumptions:
1) It’s possible to choose a basis which does a good job separating the slope from the level
2) Our perturbations are all small relative to the curvature of the terrain, such that we can model things as an n-dimensional plane
3) “Known” errors can be easily avoided, even in many dimensional space, such that the main remaining question is what the right answers are
4) Maintenance of higher standards doesn’t help distinguish between better and worse directions.
5) Drama pushes in random directions, rather than directions selected for being important and easy to fuck up.
1) In a high dimensional space, almost all bases have the slope distributed among many basis vectors. If you can find a basis that has a basis vector pointing right down the gradient and the rest normal to it, that’s great. If your bridge has one weak strut, fix it. However, there’s no reason to suspect we can always or even usually do this. If you had to describe the direction of improvement from a rotting log to a nice cable stayed bridge, there’s no way you could do it simply. You could name the direction “more better”, but in order to actually point at it or build a bridge, many many design choices will have to be made. In most real world problems, you need to look in many individual directions and decide whether it’s an improvement or not and how far to go. Real world value is built on many “marginal” improvements.
2) The fact that we’re even breathing at all means that we’ve stacked up a lot of them. Almost every configuration is completely non-functional, and being in any way coherent requires getting a lot of things right. We are balanced near optima on many dimensions, even thought there is plenty left to go. While almost all “small” deviations have even smaller impact, almost all “large” deviations cause a regression to the mean or at least have more potential loss than gain. The question is whether all perturbations can be assumed small, and the answer is clear from looking at the estimated curvature. On a bad day you can easily exhibit half the tolerance that you do on a good day. Different social settings can change the tolerance by *much* more than that. I could be pretty easily convinced that I’m averaging 10% too tolerant or 10% too intolerant, but a factor of two either way is pretty clearly bad in expectation. In other words, the terrain is can *not* be taken as planar.
3) Going uphill, even when you know which way is up, is *hard*, and there is a tendency to downslide. Try losing weight, if you have any to lose. Try exercising as much as you think you should. Or just hiking up a real mountain. Gusts of wind don’t blow you up the mountain as often as they push you down; gusts of wind cause you to lose your footing, and when you lose your footing you inevitably degenerate into a high entropy mess that is further from the top. Getting too little sleep, or being yelled at too much, doesn’t cause people to do better as often as it causes them to do worse. It causes people to lose track of longer term consequences, and short term gradient following leads to bad long term results. This is because so many problems are non-minimum phase. Bike riding requires counter-steering. Strength training requires weight lifting, and accepting temporary weakening. Getting rewarded for clear thinking requires first confronting the mistakes you’ve been making. “Knowing which way to go” is an important part of the problem too, and it does become limiting once you get your other stuff in order, but “consistently performs as well as they could, given what they know” is a damn high bar, and we’re not there yet. “Do the damn things you know you’re supposed to to, and don’t rationalize excuses” is a really important part of it, and not as easy as it sounds.
4) Our progress on one dimension is not independent of our ability to progress on the others. Eat unhealthy foods despite knowing better, and you might lose a day of good mental performance that you could have use to figure out “which direction?”. Let yourself believe a comforting belief, and that little deviation from the truth can lead to much larger problems in the future. One of the coolest things about LW, in my view, is that people here are epistemically careful enough that they don’t shoot themselves in the foot *immediately*. Most people reason themselves into traps so quickly that you either have to be extremely careful with the order and manner in which you present things, or else you have to cultivate an unusual amount of respect so they’ll listen for long enough to notice their confusion. LW is *better* at this. LW is not *perfect* at this. More is better. We don’t have clear thinking to burn. So much of clear thinking has to do with having room to countersteer that doing anything but maximizing it to the best of our ability is a huge loss in future improvement.
5) Drama is not unimportant, and it is not separable. We are social creatures, and the health and direction of our social structures is a big deal. If you want to get anything done as a community, whether it be personal rationality improvement or collective efforts, the community has to function or that ain’t gonna happen. That involves a lot of discussing which norms and beliefs should be adopted, as well as meta-norms and beliefs about how disagreement should be handled, and applying to relevant cases. Problems with bad thinking become exposed and that makes such discussions both more difficult and more risky, but also more valuable to get right. Hubris that gets you in trouble when talking to others doesn’t just go away when making private plans and decisions, but in those cases you do lack someone to call you on it and therefore can’t so easily find which direction(s) you are erring in. Drama isn’t a “random distraction”, it’s an error signal showing that something is wrong with your/your communities sense making organs, and you need those things in order to find the right directions and then take them. It’s not the *only* thing, and there are plenty of ways to screw it up while thinking you’re doing the right thing (non-minimumphase again), but it is selected (if imperfectly) for being centered around the most important disagreements, or else it wouldn’t command the attention that it does.