That would be fabulous, I’ll definitely put you in touch.
ShannonFriedman
Karma: 966
Thanks for the acknowledgment :) I have quite a few friends of “its complicated” gender, I think it kind of gives you all superpowers in the sense that you are so much more aware of a very large and frequently used set of assumptions most people are making, and exceptions to them - you are forced to see more of the structure of the matrix just by virtue of being who you are. Please let me know if you ever make it to out to California.
Thanks!
Taking personal responsibility for making things happen. Observing opportunities and going for them. Taking risks. The act of filling out the form I posted would be a form of being an agent.
Absolutely. What are your needs and requests? Feel free to email me about yourself or fill out the form or we can just talk in person once you’re here. In general I’m on a mission to try to help the community be outputting awesome as much as possible, which for my specialties means helping people out with networking, resources, strategy, becoming aware of and dealing with big irrationalities/blocks, seeing opportunities, and a few other things like that.
Yes, sadly, for the flight and whatnot.
It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate rides from the airport (I’ll do it if I can) and there are tons of people around who would be happy to give you rides to events locally and whatnot.
Cool, keep me posted. I doubt I’ll still have access to a room, but I can poke around and see who has couch space available.
Hi There,
Thanks for the feedback and the opportunity to clarify. That list was meant as the sorts of things I would find intriguing/be interested in as examples, not requirements or filters. Any sort of wanting to improve the world in a way that creates value is of interest to me. And I’m not even asking for success, just some amount of desire. Just having it as part of their mental model and having an eye out for opportunities would be something I would value.
Awesome! I look forward to meeting you :)
Cool! Drop me a line when you get here and I’ll be happy to hook you up with social events and introductions.
Thanks for the write-up Evelyn! I’m so thrilled that you came to visit. I really enjoyed spending time with you and getting to know you, and look forward to much more. I asked for agenty, and boy do you fill that! Its extremely exciting to be in the presence of a person like you who goes out and makes things happen in the world. Having both the Less Wrong memes and agency is an extremely powerful combination—I look forward to following your adventures over time, and hopefully sharing many with you.
Tips for Starting Group Houses
Getting groups in vision alignment can be quite tricky. I have a lot of personal experience and training working with this and can generally get groups there in situations where I think its important where I am trying to do this, but it is by no means an easy thing to do, especially without training, if you’re dealing with a group that also is not experienced with how to sort out interpersonal disagreement.
In general, while not always elegant, you usually can get agreement with adults who feel that they have freedom of choice and ability to express their preferences. Someone will make a compromise, which isn’t necessarily their preference, but which feels good enough that they’re willing to commit in service of being able to function as a group. If you absolutely can’t get agreement, then I don’t recommend sharing living space.
Agreed, its important to be realistic. With the hot tub, I made a detailed list of all expected expenses, plus margin for unexpected—I think I heard that projects usually cost about 20% more than the estimate. It ended up costing quite a bit more in practice, so I checked with people to see if they were okay with the upward adjustment, and then asked for a max that they were willing to spend so that I could continue working on it without continued asking at every point. We were able to make it happen for under the max.
Another trick with group houses is making payment optional/voluntary—sometimes projects can get blocked because not everyone wants to contribute equally, so its good to just ask people to chip in what its worth to them, or whatever it is that they want to chip in, and see if you can cover expenses in a way that works for everyone. There are a lot of different options.
As far as people not living up to expectations, that can definitely be an issue. I personally get around this by trying to automate as much as possible. Getting a housekeeper, and including expense of paying the housekeeper to take care of the hot tub was part of the expense estimate I gave that everyone agreed to.
Really great! Our first guest, Evelyn (http://lesswrong.com/lw/dm4/berkely_visit_report/), is amazing, as is her friend Copt who came with her. The second of three women who have booked flights to visit is here right now along with her brother, she’s a physics major from Vienna, Austria. The third is someone who is into math, japanese literature, meditation, and programming! I also have had several contacts with people via the post either tangential or who would like to visit at later dates.
Thanks, fixed.
Feedback
Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don’t just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.
Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.
Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you’re talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they’ll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.
Here’s an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”
In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.
Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it’s a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged—and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it’s a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.
Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it’s not likely to get across to others, it’s super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.
Betting
I’d like to encourage betting under this post. Zvi has agreed to advise someone on how to set up the market if a volunteer wants to take this on! Zvi is an expert on betting markets, and having him as an advisor is an awesome opportunity. If you think this sounds like something that you would like to capitalize on, and you are willing to commit to putting in the effort to do the project justice if you are chosen, please fill out the the form.
Bets could be on things like:
minimum number of projects that will get started as a result of this post and when
measures of success for various projects over various periods of time
Basically, whatever measurable aspects of success or failure people are interested in.
For bets, I encourage people to keep in mind the mission:
Let’s collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people’s lives.
Thus, my request is that you only bet against a project if you think you can prevent yourself from sabotaging people’s efforts as a result. Negative bets are quite valuable, they help give people more realistic expectations and give people something to bet positively against!
The rules for bets that projects will succeed are different in this context than in a lot of standard games. Because the mission is to win the game of making humanity awesome, as opposed to a more restricted game, everything that is ethical and legal is fair game for influencing the outcome of your bets. You can offer resources to increase your odds of winning, such as personal time/money investment in the projects, counseling, connections, office space, or any other resources that seem like they might be useful.
Organization
If this post succeeds, it will create a lot of data that will be much more useful if it is organized. I’d like to follow it up with posts in the discussion section, or possibly main for big things, that are focused on more specific niches within the broad topic of businesses that make the world better.
It would be great if more people want to join me with optimizing the organizational end of this. I think the ideal would be to start a discussion thread for this once we see what sorts of responses come in. Perhaps a simple rule to start might be that if you feel inspired to start a new top level thread, post to the organizational thread first, and wait at least 24hrs for feedback before implementing. I think good, well-thought-out high level organization will go quite a ways toward productive discussion and ideas actually getting implemented.
It would also be nice to start a wiki, volunteers for this would be great, but I’d like some discussion about this for at least a couple of days on the organization thread before it happens, since the quality and implementation of the wiki will have a big impact on how useful it is, and it would be best to do it right the first time and not end up with multiple wikis.
For this post, I encourage people to start threads for things such as:
people offering physical/material resources.
people interested in working on projects in various fields.
people interested in leading projects.
people who have resources such as niche training or lots of money and a particular passion related to making the world better that they would be interested in making a certain project happen related to.
In addition to posting publicly if you are interested in working on a project, you can also fill out this form to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches. ) to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches.
I have a blog I really want to post, but I just created my profile on LW and don’t have any karma yet. Can you please up vote this comment so that I can post? I’m a long time community member, just new to the blog.
Warmly, Shannon