moses

Karma: 277

moses Apr 6, 2019, 11:03 AM
1 point
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: How do people become ambitious?
Ah, yes, when I say “choose”, I mean system-2-choose (i.e. the former meaning in your comment). Learning how to

actually decide to actually write the book

(i.e. how to work with setting intentions, or in general, how to overcome akrasia) would already be a to-do included on the big to-do list called “achieving goal X”.

In any case, if I understand it correctly, the question still is: how do people become capable of achieving big goals, including whatever system-1 manipulation, intention-setting, habit-forming, incentive-landscape-shaping, motivation-hacking, etc. is necessary to achieve these goals?

moses Apr 6, 2019, 9:33 AM
2 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: How do people become ambitious?
I remain confused about your definitions. From the Paul Graham article:

If willfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination, ambition is how you choose it.

This would suggest a definition of “ambition” as it is commonly used: the tendency to choose big goals. On the other hand, you say:

Some people seem “born ambitious” but there’s not a lot I can change my actions based on that.

Okay, now I have a little insight into your motivations for thinking about this: you want to become more “ambitious” yourself. But this suggest “ambitious” to mean rather something like “capable of achieving big goals”—you don’t need to attain the “tendency to choose big goals”, because that’s trivially easy, and anyway, if you care about this topic, that means you already have big goals.

So, does your question in the OP mean something along the lines of “how do people become capable of achieving big goals”?

moses Apr 5, 2019, 8:46 PM
2 points
in reply to: Jay Molstad’s comment on: How do people become ambitious?

Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail

I think this is roughly correct, though. Or, to put it better: To the degree that you are low in conscientiousness, this is true for you. To the degree that you are high in conscientiousness, you’re not reading this comment, because you have better things to do with your life.

moses Apr 5, 2019, 8:36 PM
18 points
in reply to: Jay Molstad’s comment on: How do people become ambitious?
So interesting—I have the exact opposite intuition: it is technically relatively easy to have a large impact, if you are the kind of person naturally inclined to do so (i.e., very roughly speaking, high in the achievement/industriousness aspect of conscientiousness, probably?), but almost nobody is naturally inclined to do so (I blame the ancestral environment).

If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life.

…How, in Lord’s name, is this not precisely the case? Every major entrepreneur, artist, musician, public intellectual, celebrity, politician, athlete, scientist, engineer, activist, etc., etc., there’s millions of people who affect millions or more lives constantly.

moses Apr 5, 2019, 9:23 AM
4 points
on: How do people become ambitious?
Also, I for one would love to read insight porn about your pet psych theory, aside from getting a literature review. I wouldn’t worry too much about getting stuck in “cognitive traps”; insight porn is merely for entertainment and literature reviews are for getting the facts :)

moses Apr 5, 2019, 9:05 AM
4 points
on: How do people become ambitious?
Clarifying questions:
1. By agency, do you mean anyone who has the inclination to “think through plans”/”decide how to pursue goals”, or only those who do these things correctly and consequently actually achieve something tangible? I’m asking because there’s a world of difference between “how do people gain the inclination to behave ‘agenty’” and “how do people actually achieve things”.
2. If someone has ambitious goals, but they don’t yet have “plans which they realistically expect to achieve”, because the planning part is really really hard (but they definitely view themselves as “this [big goal] is what I want from life” and they’re emotionally committed to it), does that fall under what you mean by ambition? Or is the “plans” part necessary? Again, big difference between having grand visions for yourself and having a concrete set of steps to achieve them.
3. Do you mean to imply that there is a relationship/correlation between agency and ambition? I.e., someone who has larger plans/goals is more likely to be self-motivating/decisive/etc. and vice versa?

moses Apr 3, 2019, 5:14 PM
5 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: What LessWrong/Rationality/EA chat-servers exist that newcomers can join?
Invite link: https://join.slack.com/t/rationalityeurope/shared_invite/enQtNTYwNTM2NDU4MTM1LTlhMGNjMWRkYmYyOTdlNDQyZDdhNzkxNjQxNGNjZGJmMGE1ZjUzNDZhZGYyMTQxZjcxNmY4ZjVkNTlkN2ViNjI

moses Mar 9, 2019, 5:08 PM
2 points
on: Asking for help teaching a critical thinking class.
After you’re done with the class, do you think you could post a summary of what you ended up going with?

moses Dec 20, 2018, 11:18 PM
22 points
1
on: What self-help has helped you?
Not trying to do things alone

Doing things with other people or through other people makes everything a hundred times easier. I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

For example:

Personality changes: I quit cigarettes and weed cold turkey, started lifting weights, completely changed my diet, and became much more ambitious (which manifested in learning programming and tripling my salary within one year), all completely effortlessly, just by switching from a social group where the previous behavior was the norm to a social group where the new behavior was the norm.

Material resources: Almost all of my jobs, almost all of the apartments I’ve lived in, and a significant proportion of my romantic/sexual relationships I got through friends or acquaintances. Also, a couple times I’ve got through a rough patch thanks to loans/material help from friends.

Doing things together: So far I’ve been doing most things alone, because (1) I’m still only beginning to grasp how much this whole lesson is true and how much I’m not doing it (2) I still have to fight things like extreme introversion (getting tired by people), extreme conflict avoidance (I’m an “exit” rather than “voice” type of person), the fear of reaching out/being vulnerable, not paying attention and falling into old behavioral patterns, etc.

But going off limited and/or second-hand experience, things like…
- starting a business
- learning a completely new field
- moving to a different country and trying to get a job there
…can be pants-shittingly terrifying if done alone, and relatively effortless and enjoyable if done with other people.

Feedback: I still have to figure out how to beat honest feedback out of people (they’re surprisingly reluctant to criticize), but even the limited amount of feedback I was able to get lead me to discover gaping blindspots in my social skills (which I can now work on) and helped me understand my social interactions in the past (e.g. why so many people hated me in high school). But again, I had to be really persistent to get at least one person to be honest with me for once.

It starts to seem to me that not trying to solicit feedback/input constantly is highly suboptimal. Would you believe that most people almost never actively solicit feedback?

In general, I’m trying to steer slowly from yapping at people about my own ideas to listening to what they have to say about things. I think it’s recently been useful in learning about e.g. productivity and entrepreneurship, or what the world looks like from a woman’s perspective. Again, it feels like almost nobody does this.

Summary

Trying to achieve anything alone is just plain stupid. (This is the kind of heuristic that’s not meant to be literally true, it’s just meant to make you better off if you trust it. YMMV.)

And I mean, it all sounds obvious, but just watch yourself, see how often you do things alone vs. ask for advice/help/feedback/companionship/support/etc. (or for that matter, how often you offer these things to others).

moses 12 Dec 2018 13:36 UTC
14 points
on: What is “Social Reality?”
Here’s how I use the terms “(natural) reality” and “social reality”:

Natural reality is “that which doesn’t go away if you stop believing in it” (P. K. Dick).

Social reality is that which doesn’t go away when you alone stop believing in it, but it does go away proportionally to how many people stop believing in it (weighted, it seems, by something like “social belief negotiating power”, or what pick-up artists would call “the strength of one’s frame”, I think). Example: “Bob is the highest-status person in this social group.”

Why call it “reality”?

Eliezer said about reality in general: “I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’” (from The Simple Truth).

From your individual point of view, social reality behaves exactly like that—it is given; you are a price-taker; you can run experiments against it and it will determine the results.

The scope of what falls under natural reality, i.e. what doesn’t go away when person X stops believing in it, is the same for every X; it is objective.

The funny thing about social reality is that it’s not objective in this sense. For someone with a very strong frame, the scope of social reality (i.e. what doesn’t go away when they stop believing in it, or more interestingly put, what doesn’t materialize as soon as they start believing in it) is very small, and vice versa. (“Funny” mostly for the strong-frame people, because their life seems almost magically easier from the POV of someone who happens to have a combination of a much weaker frame and very low status. I assume it’s not very funny for the latter person.)

Things can also fall in and out of the scope of your social reality (e.g. when you move to go to college, you can reinvent your social role, but then it slowly ossifies around you and becomes inescapable reality).

(I wanted to link Valentine Smith’s post on the Intelligent Social Web as a more in-depth explanation, but I noticed you commented on it, so I could’ve saved myself the trouble and just said “yeah, that”. Well, nevermind.)
What links here?
- Raemon's comment on Causal Reality vs Social Reality by Ruby (25 Jun 2019 0:15 UTC; 8 points)

moses

Not trying to do things alone

Summary