I think this part of Heroic Responsibility isn't too surprising/novel to people. Obviously the business owner has responsibility for the business. The part that's novel is more like: If I'm some guy working in legal, and I notice this hot potato going around, and it's explicitly not my job to deal with it, I might nonetheless say "ugh, the CEO is too busy to deal with this today and it's not anyone else's job. I will deal with it." Then you go to each department head, even if you're not even a department head you're a lowly intern (say), and say "guys, I think we need to decide who's going to deal with this." And if their ego won't let them take advice from an intern, you might also take it as your responsibility to figure out how to navigate their ego – maybe by making them feel like it was their own idea, or by threatening to escalate to the CEO if they don't get to it themselves, or by appealing to their sense of duty. A great example of this, staying with them realm of "random Bureaucracy", I got from @Elizabeth: E. D. Morel was a random bureaucrat at a shipping company in 1891. He noticed that his company was shipping guns and manacles into the Congo, and shipping rubber and other resources back out to Britain. It was not Morel's job to notice that this was a bit weird. It was not Morel's job to notice that that weirdness was a clue, and look into those clues. And then find out that what was happening was, weapons were being sent to the Congo to forcibly steal resources at gunpoint. It was not his job to make it his mission to raise awareness of the Congo abuses and stop them. But he did. ... P.S. A failure mode of rationalists is to try to take Heroic responsibility for everything, esp. in a sort of angsty way that is counterproductive and exhausting. It's also a failure mode to act as if only you can possibly take Heroic responsibility, rather than trying to model the ecosystem around you and the other actors (some of whom might be Live Players who are also taking Heroic Responsibility, some of whom might be sort of local actors following normal incentives but are still, like, part of the solution) There is nuance to when and how to do Heroic Responsibility well.

Hm, I am unsure how much to believe this, even though my intuitions go the same way as yours. As a correlational datapoint, I tracked my success from cold approach and the time I've spent meditating (including a 2-month period of usually ~2 hours of meditation/day), and don't see any measurable improvement in my success rate from cold approach: (Note that the linked analysis also includes a linear regression of slope -6.35e-08, but with p=0.936, so could be random.) In cases where meditation does stuff to your vibe-reading of other people, I would guess that I'd approach women who are more open to being approached. I haven't dug deeper into my fairly rich data on this, and the data doesn't include much post-retreat approaches, but I still find the data I currently have instructive. I wish more people tracked and analyzed this kind of data, but I seem alone in this so far. I do feel some annoyance at everyone (the, ah, "cool people"?) in this area making big claims (and sometimes money off of those claims) without even trying to track any data and analyze it, leaving it basically to me to scramble together some DataFrames and effect sizes next to my dayjob.[1] > So start meditating for an hour a day for 3 months using the mind illuminated as an experiment (getting some of the cool skills mentioned in Kaj Sotala's sequence?) and see what happens? Do you have any concrete measurable predictions for what would happen in that case? ---------------------------------------- 1. I often wonder if empiricism is just incredibly unintuitive for humans in general, and experimentation and measurement even more so. Outside the laboratory very few people do it, and see e.g. Aristotle's claims about the number of women's teeth or his theory of ballistics, which went un(con)tested for almost 2000 years? What is going on here? Is empiricism really that hard? Is it about what people bother to look at? Is making shit up just so much easier so that everyone keeps in that mode, which is a stable equilibrium? ↩︎

Serious question: (well, it'll start as "more of a comment, really", but, at the end I do have a question) The comment: I think the world is bottlenecked on people understanding the sort of concepts in posts like these. I don't think the world is particularly bottlenecked on current-gen-Yudkowsky-shaped dialogue essays about it. They appeal to a small set of people.  My guess is you write them anyway because they are pretty easy to write in your default style and maybe just mostly fun-for-their-own-sake. And when you're in higher-effort modes, you do also write things like If Anyone Builds It, that are shaped pretty different. And, probably these essays still help some people, and maybe they help workshop new analogies that eventually can be refined into If Anyone style books or podcast interviews. But, that said, my questions are: * How much have you experimented with finding low-energy-but-different formats, that might reroll on who finds them compelling? * (I'm particularly interested in if there turns out to be anything short in this reference class) * How much have you (or, anyone else, this doesn't have to be you) systematically thought about how to improve the distribution channel of this sort of essay so it reaches more people? Both of these are presumably high effort. I'm not sure if the the first one is a better use of your high-effort time than other things, or how likely it is to work out. But, wondering if this is an area you think you've already checked for low or mid-hanging fruit it. (Also, having now thought about it for 5 min, I think this sort of thing would actually make a good youtube video that the Rational Animations people might do. That could be mostly outsourced)