For what it’s worth, I endorse this aesthetic and apologize for any role I played in causing people to focus too much on the hero thing. You need a lot of nonheroes per hero and I really want to validate the nonheroes but I guess I feel like I don’t know how, or like it’s not my place to say because I didn’t make the same sacrifices… or what feels to me like it ought to be a sacrifice, only maybe it’s not.
“Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.”
You've already said it. But it doesn't hurt to repeat.
I suspect this is a consequence of the situation that rationalists often feel alone. Not necessarily alone as people (although that also happens), but alone as rationalists. Before I found LW, I was in a situation where I had a few friends, but probably none of them would be interested in the kind of debates we have on LW.
If there is only one person in the whole Shire who cares about destroying the ring, would we want that person to be Frodo or Samwise? Frodo would probably try the mission alone, even if less efficiently. Samwise would probably settle for the second best mission, for a mission where he could find a hero to follow.
In different situations different traits are required. In a situation where the individuals are isolated, we would probably want every individual to be a hero, because heroes can act in isolation. On the other hand, in a functional community, having a few highly efficient heroes is probably better than having too many heroes with low efficiency.
So maybe we could use the presence of integrated sidekicks as a measure of health of the community.
This reminds me of some unhealthy behavior I have seen in Mensa: people who have spent so much time in their lives t...
Hmm. I grew up with a different experience. Don't remember feeling especially alone-as-a-rationalist. Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am. And I think to a large degree it's just a personality difference. From the outside, it sometimes looks like other rationalists are trying to conclude that other people are dumb or unstrategic. (Including Eliezer). This makes no sense to me.
I sometimes wish I could drag various rationalists to my job at the ICU for a while, make them see the kind of teamwork and cooperation that happens in a place where cooperation is a default and a necessity. Nurses, for the most part, just cooperate. Even when there are conflicts. Even when they don't like each other. (Although the degree of "agency" that the team as a whole has does vary with how much the individuals like each other and get along.) I don't know how to make this magic happen on demand, aside from applying selection bias to get the kinds of people who want to be nurses, and then giving them hard-but-manageable problems to solve. And I think I did learn a lot about cooperation at work.
Now I'm curious about the other implications of a society where individuals are isolated. What does that even look like? What do people spend their time doing? What causes the isolation? ...Sci-fi plot brewing.
Some parts of my childhood were unusual; my parents are pretty exceptionally sane, my brother is as interested in rationality as I am.
There was a research (sorry, I don't have the link) about highly intelligent children, whether they later in life became successful people or losers, and the conclusion was that it mostly depended on the family. If the family provided models of how to use high intelligence for professional success (e.g. the parents were doctors or lawyers), the children became successful and integrated; if the family didn't have such model (a gifted child in otherwise average family), the children often became weird loners. But if I remember correctly, if those loners had families and their own highly intelligent children, the second generation was okay.
Of course rationality is not the same as high intelligence, but I suspect there is a similar effect of being a weirdo in one's own family, versus being a part of the team. There are differences: High intelligence is often considered a positive trait by average people; the problem is it creates unrealistic expectations (if you have high intelligence, you are supposed to magically overcome any problem and should neve...
Two different types of sidekicks need to be distinguished: second in command, and assistant.
A second in command is someone who can at need temporarily take charge when the leader is absent or incapacitated, and at other times be engaged with the leader doing the same work, but leaving most of the initiative to the leader. Samwise is a second in command.
An assistant is not in the chain of command. Nick Bostrom is looking for an assistant, not a second in command.
Hmm. That's true. I'm not sure how much this is actually a dichotomy in practice, as opposed to a gradient where some sidekicks are more assistant-like, some are in the middle, and some are more second-in-command like. I'm also not sure to what degree the same people are attracted to both second-in-command and assistant roles, and whether it's for the same reasons. That would affect whether it makes sense to classify them together for this purpose. I can come up with imaginary characters who would only be interested in second-in-command, or only in assistant roles, but they both appeal to me for many of the same reasons.
I kind of feel like it has to do with the sidekick's competence and also the scale of the project. If the project is of a scale where it's possible for the hero to make most of the decisions, and the sidekick is new to it and finds assistant-work hard enough, it'll tend towards that role. If the sidekick and hero keep working together, as they both learn and grow, the hero will want to move on to larger-scale projects, and at some point there will be too many high-level decisions for the hero to make all of them, and at this point the sidekick will have been working with them for a long time and learned a lot, and it seems like it might naturally turn into a second-in-command role. But this would only happen in a situation where roles are fluid; if it were a standard case of a CEO and their executive assistant, the role would be unlikely to change that much. (Although EAs do have quite a lot of decision-making power.)
If you're at all familiar with the SCA, one of the three peerage orders is that of the Pelican: http://www.sca.org.au/pelicans/ it awards people for outstanding service (seriously, to get one, you have to have run many events over a decade, and worked damn hard making people happy to get it). You are unlikely to get one unless you consistently, and sustainedly want to serve the needs of others for long period of time.
You strike me as potential Pelican material...
Note: The fact that this community (the SCA) consistently gives accolades for service is, I think, one of the reasons why it is so successful at being a Community.
By contrast, the other two peerages: Chivalry (for sword fighting) and Laurels (for making cool stuff) are both "Look what I did/made" orders... full of heroes (the former more than the latter, in my mind). Which is great and necessary and really cool... but without the Pelicans, the Society as a whole wouldn't exist.
My suggestion: adopt and help sustain a community of rationalists near you.
Neat! I didn't know that was a thing. Society consistently surprises me by being cooler and bigger than I expect.
Edit: I'm trying to find out what 'SCA' stands for and the first google result was "Sudden Cardiac Arrest." Google knows me way too freaking well.
I'm trying to understand why I have a strong aversive reaction to this sort of discussion. If I'm honest, I feel worried that people who identity as "sidekicks" risk being exploited by those who identity as "heroes". A healthy community will tend to discourage this sort of taxonomy in various ways in order to avoid the risk of abuse, but the core members of the rationality movement seem to not recognize the social necessity of doing this.
And yet the response is not "maybe invoking the hero archetype at every possible opportunity is a bad idea", but rather doubling down on the idea that the leading figures of our movements should be modeled as genuine Lord-of-the-rings heroes. And since not everyone can bring themselves to believe that they are Frodo, we decide that invoking another high-fantasy archetype is the right solution?!
I'm curious as to why you so strongly think that sidekicks risk being abused, and that "healthy" communities will discourage this dynamic hard. I– I don't want to say that I want to be exploited, but I crave being useful, and being used to my full usefulness. I don't think this desire is unhealthy. Yes, this means that it's always tempting to throw too much of myself at a project, but that's the same problem as learning not to say yes to all the overtime shifts at the hospital and end up working 70 hours a week. I guess you could say that someone I was working for could "abuse" me by forcing me, or coercing or sweet-talking me, into the equivalent of "taking all the overtime shifts." But (in my limited experience of this) the leader's more common motivation seems to be in the opposite direction–of being afraid of pushing their sidekick too far.
I'm wondering whether you have some different experience of this, and would be interested in your elaboration if you have one.
I also had a weird reaction to your post, like emr and someonewrongonthenet. Personally, I feel that it's healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it's unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24/7 and possibly sleep with them). Yay professionalism and work/life balance, boo medieval loyalties and imagined life narratives!
That's also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
You could say that a world of inherently equal professionals exchanging services, without PCs or NPCs, is too barren to many people. Some people actually want to feel like heroes, and others want to feel like sidekicks. Who am I to deny them that roleplay? Well, some people also want to fit in the "warrior" role, being fiercely loyal to their group and attacking outsiders. We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
Personally, I feel that it's healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it's unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24/7 and possibly sleep with them).
I think this is exactly what Brienne is talking about when she points out that society doesn't look kindly on people who want to serve others. And... I think maybe you're pointing at something real. It does seem possible that when "being" an assistant breaks, it breaks harder than when "working as" an assistant breaks. So it's a higher-stakes situation to put yourself in. (Both for the leader and for their assistant).
I don't think that negates any of what I said in the post though. Half of my point is basically just "some people are the kind of people who want to be nurses, no, really." Like, it seems to be really hard for people who aren't those kind of people to understand that for me, roles that aren't especially high-status but involve being really useful to other people hit all of my happiness buttons. That people are actually different and that their dream job might be one I'd hate, and vice...
I'm not sure why we're focusing in on narratives here, but I suspect it's for not very good reasons. Whether it's good for some people to "think of themselves as sidekicks" seems less important than whether it's good for people to actually perform the actions of a "sidekick". We can talk about how to promote or discourage the set of actions once that's settled. I'd much rather present a breakdown of what I actually do day to day and why, and then have people point out what precisely it is that I'm doing wrong.
So, I think that a sidekick can feel some ownership over what their hero does, and that feeling that will make them a better sidekick (in part, because they will be less likely to stop thinking about it at 6 pm).
I'm also having a hard time disentangling this in my mind from thoughts about households: in some sense, couples cofound a household together, and it seems counter-productive to think about that in solely mercenary terms, or to 'clock out' of your household.
I think I also find myself unhappy with what might be reflexive egalitarianism that is unhappy with unequal splits of decision-making power or status or so on. It's okay to be unseen; it's okay to be a junior partner; it's okay to be a servant. A lot of talk about 'purpose' emphasizes having 'something bigger than yourself,' and it seems to me that finding purpose in the people around you is something worth applauding.
You can't be the sidekick of a hero anymore than you can be the student of an enlightened spiritual guru, or the patient of witchdoctor. If you go looking for a hero, who do you think you will find?
There is no chance that a Frodo-style hero exists, and that you've correctly identified one (versus an admirable non-hero or a fool or a charlatan), and that the hero needs the help of a sidekick to function as a hero (versus someone they can hire, or the support of standard social relationships) and that a genuine hero is going to be like "why yes I am a hero please quit your nursing job and be my (first? second? third?) sidekick in order to marginally increase my odds of saving the world".
The danger is to those people who can recognize that they themselves are not gurus, witchdoctors, heroes, perfect rationalists or ubermensch-programmer-super-geniuses-saving-the-world, but still believe that there are large and identifiable classes of people out there who actually are. And who then feel that the only way to have a non-shameful standing relative to their largely imaginary peers to find one to team up with!
That said, my critique is more against the notion that there is a sp...
Something else to remember: The Lord of the Rings took around six months. And considering that hobbits live longer than humans, by human standards it's more like 4 months. In other words, heroes and sidekicks in pieces of fiction do not use up all their life or pawn their future in order to be heroes or sidekicks. Perhaps if they get unlucky (Frodo was injured), but that's only a chance.
Even superheroes, who seem to be an exception to this, are saved by the genre conceits that 1) for some strange reason, if you're not specifically obsessed like Batman, being a superhero doesn't completely preclude a normal life, and 2) although the timescale of comic books means we don't see it much, superheroes eventually stop being superheroes, and starting a family is one of the biggest reasons for one to stop.
Even if heroes and sidekicks existed in the real world, dedicating your life to Eliezer's cause is a lot more extreme than being a hero or a sidekick, and should be thought of with appropriately greater skepticism.
I think an interesting related meme is "leadership as service". This idea certainly existed in the Boy Scouts when I was in high school, and a related idea of "management as service" exists in at least some good tech companies.
I don't personally like the "hero" narrative that much but I am highly ambitious and willing to do things even if no one else is doing them. Nevertheless, in fact, as a result of this, I often end up in what might seem like "sidekick roles". I've oftentimes taken on logistical tasks even though it's easy to argue that my comparative advantage is elsewhere. Why? Because if I don't, then some important thing won't get done, and that's all that matters. This is what I think Eliezer means when he refers to "heroic responsibility", and I think you among all people I've met exemplify this the most. So that's one interesting observation.
Another observation in my personal experience is that it's extremely difficult to take a "hero" role in more than one thing at once, simply because it's too time-consuming. I have several causes that I contribute my time to, but in many cases my ability to do so is limited b...
Great post, as usual! Every time I see your post I anticipate reading it in delight, and am never disappointed. Hope you and Ruby will accomplish great things.
I cannot help but notice that all non-fictional sidekicks you mentioned are female. I tried to think of famous real-life examples of a dependable and trusted companion who makes the hero what he or she is, and had trouble finding more than one or two males. I wonder if this is more or female trait, whether by nature or nurture, or the result of the infamous patriarchy, or maybe I just don't know of many.
Have you heard of Charlie Munger? Most people probably haven't, which is part of why he's a great (male, real life) sidekick. Munger is the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and has been Warren Buffet's right hand man for decades. Munger is one of the examples in Michael Eisner's (former Disney CEO) book on partnerships. One of the book's main points is that 50-50 is a very unstable split in a business partnership, but if one of the partners is willing to stand half a step lower the couple can achieve more.
You see this example a lot in sports, and by "you" I mean me because I've met few rationalists who care about sports as much as I do :) Scottie Pippen would've been an excellent player on his own, but being Michael Jordan's sidekick made him an all-time great.
Since professional sports is very competitive and rewards "alpha dogs" with all of the money and fame (endorsement deals, max contracts, hottest groupies), players who could have been amazing Robins become mediocre Batmans. If players were only paid based on winning championships, I'm sure that would change. If your goal is to save the world, that's the only goal and no one cares about "individual stats". With this goal drawing quite a few heroes, being a sidekick may well be the best, noblest, and most effective way to contribute.
I've also had this thought. A few people I've showed this too are explicitly bothered about the what-if-it's-a-result-of-the-patriarchy; one person is tempted to identify as a Samwise character, but reluctant to because Sexist Overtones. I...don't think this is the right response. It's a bit like saying "no, I'm going to be a doctor instead of a nurse because women are pushed into nursing by The Patriarchy." Maybe it's true, but it's orthogonal to whether an individual will like nursing or medicine more (although, honestly, they're not that different).
Other thoughts: everyone who wrote publicly about this was female, but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male. So... Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?
I've already had the thought that the message I'm sending might be bad if it spread to society as a whole, because women may be pushed harder away from being CEOs than from being their executive assistants (or whatever the dichotomy), and even a well-written and nuanced pro-sidekick message is going to get parsed as "smart lady says your place is as an assistant." (If a man wrote this post, the message would be different, but I'm not a man.) I still this this message is pretty positive for the LW/CFAR/rationality community to hear; its biases run in different directions.
but most of the people who have emailed me privately to thank me for the post are male.
Maybe because most LW readers are male? I am not sure it necessarily leads to the conclusion that
Men feel more shamed about wanting to be sidekicks than women do?
I am not going to generalize from myself, only think aloud. I think I could feel comfortable as a sidekick, but it seems like in many situations I don't get this option.
Part of that is related to gender stereotypes: In the past, whenever I stopped being a leader in a relationship, my then girlfriend usually quickly replaced me with a guy who enjoyed that role. (I know there are also relationships with the opposite dynamic, but I never experienced one.) Another part is about money, which indirectly is also related to gender stereotypes: I feel a pressure to make a lot of money (maybe it's just in my head, but so far I haven't met any volunteer to pay my bills, so I treat it as real). Leaders make more money than sidekicks.
Sometimes I get into leading position by being the first one or among the first ones who care about a problem. If there are other people interested in the position later, they usually easily succeed to push me away, because I am not good at status fights and I don't enjoy them. Sometimes I am even happy that someone else took the role instead of me, although I may complain about some consequences later (such as completely losing the ability to influence things).
Bu...
Good post.
I wonder if there's a pattern of idea dissemination that goes something like this:
Someone discovers an idea that seems helpful for them in interacting with the world.
They find that the more strongly they identify with the idea, the more helpful it is.
They tell all their friends about the idea, because (a) this is part of identifying with it and (b) they want to help their friends.
Their friends, being similar people, also find the idea helpful and proceed to spread it similarly.
The idea gains sufficient traction that it's no longer "this weird idea I had", but the mantra of a (possibly powerful) faction.
At this point, some people who the idea doesn't sit well with notice the idea (which now has significant psychosocial power) and experience cognitive dissonance.
At this stage, the idea (hopefully) gets optimized to be more accommodating to those people, and harmony ensues.
In other words, to provide a purely descriptive picture of what may have happened here: Eliezer found the idea of thinking of himself as a hero useful. This idea was helpful for accomplishing his goals. These goals included writing, and this is one of the things he wrote about....
I am male. I have high testosterone. I love competing and winning. I am ambitious and driven. I like to make a lot of money. I make a lot of money. I prefer the sidekick role.
If someone asks me "King or Prince?" I will respond with Prince every time. Hey, you can still be royalty without the weight of the world on your shoulders. I would still be a hard working Prince, too. If some asks me "Candidate or Campaign Manager?" I'll take Campaign Manager, thank you. If someone asks me "President or Chief of Staff?" well, you know the answer by now.
The more money I make and the more wisdom and experience I acquire, the more people naturally turn to me to lead. And I do it when necessary. I'm even pretty good at it. But, I don't love it. I don't require it. I don't see myself as growing more in that direction.
Upvoting is not sufficient given the very difference perspectives in the comments here.
I read the above article and nodded along the way thinking 'this is insightful and adds a great context to discuss and think about many industrious relationships' never once did gender cross my mind. I was floored to see it a major item in the comments.
I am male. I have high testosterone. I love competing and winning. I am ambitious and driven. I like to make a lot of money. I make a lot of money. I prefer the sidekick role.
Ditto. I've never identified as subservient, but my entire career I've found leaders to work for whose skill set I could compliment. I saw this as an issue of too many cooks ruin the stew and too many chiefs, not enough indians.
To sum this up, I think the Sidekick role is a matter of effective team building and is as far from gender as anything else in the world.
Any links to discussions on this item elsewhere? As some rationalist said, two rationalists with the same info can't help but agree.
I think that there can be a difference between being Frodo's Sam, and being a real-life hero's personal assistant/sidekick/support. In the former case, Sam is fighting orcs, hiking through treacherous mountain passes, dealing with Sméagol, etc., which is quite similar to what Frodo is doing; in the latter case, the job of the secretary/personal assistant would be much different from the job of the real-life hero. I would be happy to be Frodo's Sam, but lukewarm about being, say, Bostrom's personal assistant.
I would much rather make phone calls and schedule events than fight Orcs. The latter sounds scary.
...That being said, I do like the aspects of my current job where I get to defibrillate people once in a while. I'm going to miss that.
Another thought about the sidekick status. I recall this comment by Eliezer, where he says, in part:
If you know yourself for an NPC and that you cannot start such a project yourself, you ought to throw money at anyone launching a new project whose probability of saving the world is not known to be this small.
I could be misreading it, but if you replace "money" with "effort", he basically describes the sideckick role as "NPC". Which rubbed me the wrong way even then. I certainly would not describe you or Brienne as NPCs, no way. I wonder if it's just an unfortunate choice of words.
I think that, if Eliezer felt that way in the past, he no longer feels that way; he has told me that he thinks the sidekick role is valuable and regrets possibly having made sidekick-identified people feel otherwise.
I wonder if it's just an unfortunate choice of words.
It strikes me as consistent with a "there are the real, heroic, important people who make decisions and do stuff and change the world and do the impossible and are thousand-year-old vampires and wish to become stronger and etc., and then there's everyone else" vibe that pervades the Sequences.
(ETA: ...but which apparently is either unintentional or subsequently updated away from.)
According to OP's reply, Eliezer_2015 likely disagrees with Eliezer_<=2013 on this issue... and we have Brienne to thank for it.
So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll make sure you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.
...
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Just out of curiousity - is Frodo person implicitly intended to be a romantic partner here? Or can Frodo just be anyone you work closely with? The wording certainly makes it seems seem like a romantic partner. And it could be a spurious trend but I also couldn't help but notice the female skew of all the Samwise's you mentioned, which, given the low grade dominance/submission dynamics often at play between the genders, makes me suspect this even more.
I think nursing is a valid life choice, and I think being a Samwise is a valid choice, and I think wanting to find a romantic partner and take care of them and make their ambitious dreams co...
All of the above is true. And this post is explicitly written for the people who have bought into "the world needs saving" and are angsty about it because they don't want to perform a "hero" role but feel like they should. I'm sure there are thousands of people all around me living simple lives of devotion to their families, partners, and communities. (This includes many of my fellow nurses.) They don't need telling that this is okay. In fact, I think that in larger society, this might be an overall bad message for me personally to send, because it's possible that in society at large women are dissuaded harder from being CEOs than from being executive assistants (or whatever dichotomy) and sending that message an extra time, even if it's well-written and nuanced, would just sum up to "see, honey, another smart-sounding lady says your place in the world is as the CEO's assistant!" (The message would have a different impact if I were male, but I'm not and I can't do that hypothetical.)
But I'm posting this on Less Wrong, where the worldview of "the world is broken and my ethics dictate I try to fix it" is a pretty common mindset. It's something...
Thanks for writing this - one of the more valuable posts IMO that I've seen on LW in a while.
Sort of expanding on what you said, this seems like a specific manifestation of gains-from-trade. I'm very, very happy that there are people who enjoy or are proficient at super-different things than I am because that way I don't have to do the things that I'm bad at or dislike doing unless it's something that I want to learn or get better at.
Also,
...and no one would try to change me. Because oh boy, have people tried to do that. It’s really hard to be someone who just wants to please others, and to be told, basically, that you’re not good enough–and that you owe it to the world to turn yourself ambitious, strategic, Slytherin.
Might be good for some to keep in mind that some politeness and friendliness norms sometimes serve a similar role to ethics in this sense. This sort of stuff and precaution tends to be more important in areas where you don't know a whole lot, such as when you're trying to prescribe actions for others when you know a rather limited amount about them.
Open source projects, especially (or maybe just most saliently for me) software projects, desperately need sidekicks. I write 'desperately' because most such projects die from 'over-forking', i.e. everyone wanting to be the leader (hero) of their own project (adventure).
What I've learned most recently is that being even a moderately competent sidekick is really hard. It takes a lot of work to even be able to contribute without creating lots of extra work for the heroes and their more-devoted sidekicks.
This reminded me of a fantastic and short Ted Talk about followers: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement?language=en#t-1426
This resonated with me. I'm not prone to be the head of leadership, or to be a "hero". I do like being an early follower, however. Someone who can lend strength and support to a cause I see as worthwhile. In the parlance of the Ted Talk, I like to look for lone nuts to turn into leaders by following them. In this way, I like to think of myself as leaning into the role of selection as a follower (such as a Samwise), playing off of variation (all the lone nuts out there), and allowing for favorable evolution (of whatever).
I find myself wanting to suggest that self-described heroes and sidekicks who want a fictional character to compare themselves to pick characters from My Little Pony-- after all, the protagonists are all just so nice!
Specifically, all of the princesses in MLP are nice to everypony, despite the fact that they are all leaders. The princesses treat Shining Armor, the five of the Mane 6 who aren't princesses, Spike, and some relevant side-ponies like friends and equals, even though some of these characters are properly sidekicks. Actually, the show consistently praises "sidekick traits" like humility and agreeableness, which is quite endearing.
If I read this post correctly, you're iterating the conventional wisdom that team players are not less important or less necessary than star players even though the status is less glamorous. (They are, perhaps, more interchangeable, but also definitely indispensable on much shorter timescales than star players.) Only you are framing it in terms that make it sound as if this was not generally agreed upon by everyone not suffering from the malignant form of ambition.
Nuance matters. "Sidekick" is not meant to refer to actual humans, but to second g...
Hmmm, thank you for the posting, it sheds a light on something that I had not seen before. I like a lot of things about the posting, including the standing up part if the hero fucks up. And Samwise is an interesting "sidekick". I think he differs in at least two other aspects from the typical "sidekick" that deserve special emphasis:
First, Samwise is self-sufficient ("competent"). It's not the typical Robin character that needs to get rescued by Batman as a stupid plot ploy. He has his own skills and carries his own weight. Th...
I've noticed a similar pattern in my own personality, but I've also questioned at times whether it's healthy to be so devoted to someone else's priorities. With different friends who were higher-status than me, I've framed our dynamic in terms of Quixote/Sancho: there was the crazy knight who boldly marched towards trouble, and the little sensible voice trying to ground him in reality. Maybe what this says is that I don't choose my heroes too well.
I was chief editor at my office for one year and I concluded that there's not one fibre of leader material in ...
I think this is what Anna was getting at when she encouraged me to be a wealthy donor rather than an AI researcher. It's hard to give up the idea of being Michelangelo, being remembered for centuries in history books. But he wouldn't've managed without his patrons.
I'd rather be a hero than a sidekick. But my small contribution to mitigating AI risk has generally been in helping MIRI in whatever way seemed most valuable, rather than inventing my independent way to global utility maximization.
So, what does that make me? A cooperative small-time hero, like one of those obscure minor superhero characters in the comics who occasionally steps up to help the famous ones?
I think there is such a thing as a hero-in-training. My work with FLI has mostly been in a supporting role so far, but I view myself as an apprentice rather than a sidekick, and I would generally like to be a hero.
Yeah. This is definitely a thing. It seems good to have the vocabulary to differentiate the two, so that someone can know whether their current apprentice is aiming to be a hero or a sidekick.
I am not ambitious myself, the difference is that I don't care. I don't mind if I don't fit in the LW community, I am here to learn certain things, not to get validation and slaps on the back.
I think many of you are products of American culture and even a certain subset of it. A certain subset, perhaps going back to New England culture, that has this attitude to life that altruism, like giving to charity is something of course everybody does and the only issue is how to do it efficiently, or that ambition means achieving a personal goal of yourself, gener...
I can't help to notice that this may be a gender-correlated personality trait:
All the people you cite that gave you positive advice about being a sidekick are female. In a community which is almost 90% male this seems pretty difficult to get by chance.
You're a nurse, a typically (~90%) female job. Nurses are natural sidekicks to doctors.
I suppose that the fixation for being a hero of the LW community that makes you feel out of place may be the result of it's mostly young male demographic. Maybe young male nerds are particularly prone to that, since ...
What are rationalist heroes supposed to do? And what can “sidekicks” do to help them?
(I ask these questions as someone who’s not that familiar with the rationalist community. I asked them on the Effective Altruism Forum and there was some discussion of them there.)
I'm looking for specific examples, particular ones which aren't already being done and so are available for new heroes to take on.
Ryan Carey said "A hero means roughly what you'd expect - someone who takes personal responsibility for solving world problems. Kind of like an effective altruist...
Since this has actually gotten some interested people in my discussion post I'm cross posting it here where it makes more sense:
Reading the Main post on Sidekicks, I considered it worth noting in passing that I'm looking for a sidekick if someone feels that such would be an appropriate role for them.
This is me for those who don't know me: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14pvS8GxVlRALCV0xIlHhwV0g38_CTpuFyX52_RmpBVo/edit
And this is my flowchart/life;autobiography in the last few years: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxADVDGSaIVZVmdCSE1tSktneFU/view
Nice...
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Someone is doing what I want done, and they can do it better than me, and I can help.
If you aren't driven by status and dominance, what's the downside?
This concept of Sidekicks lends itself well to the principle of "first follower" by Derek Sivers.
First Follower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO8MwBZl-Vc Derek Sivers Remember the importance of nurturing your first followers, embrace them as equals and make it about the Movement, and not about You. Be Public, be Easy to Follow Leadership is Overglorified. It was the First Follower that transformed the Lone Nut into a Leader. There's no Movement without the First...
I think there's something in business that is similar to the hero-sidekick dichotomy you suggest. In business, I see people who are great individual contributors, but their career path "upwards" takes them into management, at which they suck. The notion that being good at managing doers is "higher" than doing has a parallel in supposed superiority of heroes to sidekicks. It's not a promotion to go from sidekick to hero: it might very well be an awkward misalignment.
Is there something underlying both of these? It might be something about leader-follower and the prestige that comes with being a leader.
I don't know about this idea. For most of my career, I've tried to be sidekick in the sense of trying to fulfill someone else's goals with say a secondary goal of mine that ties in to that primary goal, but it has always ended up in conflicts, where I couldn't simply bring myself to ignore the hero's stance/decision(and still work with him/her). Is that a good enough reason to try to be a hero? This post still resonates with me, but that doesn't mean am about to go around hero's for whom I can be a sidekick. Majority of the empirical evidence that I've (personal experience) accumulated suggests, that won't really work.
May be the distinction is not as sharp as you think/believe it is?
The link to the post on your personal blog is broken, it should be: http://swimmer963.com/?p=383
This is an awesome, awesome, awesome post! I think you have nailed a few important axis of variance that we usually neglect.
Now, precisely because you are still part of the community and can accept rationalist memes, you are an important sample to learn what the rationalist community is not. At least what it is not necessarily.
Would you, and any other self-identified rationalist sidekick, please fill out this survey?
I am analyzing how personality is related to beliefs about consciousness and memetic affiliations. If only heroes fill out the questionnaire...
I self-identify with the role of the hero. But I do so not because I think it's wonderful to struggle for righteousness, but rather because I feel a deep sense of despair when I consider pursuing other options. I'm crushing myself with the weight of heroic responsibility. This is extremely unpleasant, and naturally, makes me a much less effective person.
How can I rewrite my motivations and self-concept to be less distressing for me? How can I convince myself, emotionally and psychologically, to stop trying to be a hero? At this point, it's rather obvious that I'm not actually capable of being one. I would prefer to change my goals than to continue suffering like this.
A sidekick has a different status than the hero because they primarily fill auxiliary or submissive tasks in pursuit of the venture. I'm familiar with this status as a technical writer.
I initially started with a grand expectation that I might one day write for a crew of genius software developers working on AI, or Space Exploration, or who-knows-what. If I want these things to happen, why did I not seek the "higher" status for myself?
I've never really had a problem with math or computer science, and all throughout high school I dreamed of bein...
I self-identify with the role of the hero. But I do so not because I think it's wonderful to struggle for righteousness, but rather because I feel a deep sense of despair when I consider pursuing other options. I'm crushing myself with the weight of heroic responsibility. This is extremely unpleasant, and naturally, makes me a much less effective person.
How can I rewrite my motivations and self-concept to be less distressing for me? How can I convince myself, emotionally and psychologically, to stop trying to be a hero? At this point, it's rather obvious that I'm not actually capable of being one. I would prefer to change my goals than to continue suffering like this.
Cool how you arrived at this insightful distinction via in the end following up on that nagging feeling.
I wonder whether the hero-sidekick differentiation is a dichotomy or whether these can be independent traits.
I'm predisposed to wonder because I kind of feel both sides of it. Both not exceptionally strongly so. Possibly more the sidekick. trait. I like to make people feel at home. I'm happy to provide for and foster my and other children. Like my mother. I like cooperative team-work. But I even more enjoy to work alone. Fal into the flow. Most time of...
You might want to look at the recent thread on being a hero, http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6d/a_discussion_of_heroic_responsibility/ , in particular the comments which question the idea. A lot of the reasons why thinking of yourself as a hero are questionable apply to thinking another person is a hero as well.
Is your claim that...
For the record, I agree with each bullet point except 3.
I think my main point is "it's not true that your only options are Be a Hero or Be Insignificant, there's a third option." Because if it's presented as a dichotomy, I think many sidekick-oriented people would go for being insignificant–so the impact they could theoretically have as a hero is moot.
One of the things that comes to mind for me is the "Myth of the lone genius" and, in part, it sounds like you are continuing that myth in your use of the word "hero". A single person doing something to better the world. But I don't think such people actually exist. All of the heroes, all of the geniuses, have near armies of people beneath them that make their impact on the world happen. No single person has that kind of impact.
Very plainly said, if we investigate any person that you identify as "hero" we will find a lot of...
[Reposted from my personal blog.]
Mindspace is wide and deep. “People are different” is a truism, but even knowing this, it’s still easy to underestimate.
I spent much of my initial engagement with the rationality community feeling weird and different. I appreciated the principle and project of rationality as things that were deeply important to me; I was pretty pro-self improvement, and kept tsuyoku naritai as my motto for several years. But the rationality community, the people who shared this interest of mine, often seemed baffled by my values and desires. I wasn’t ambitious, and had a hard time wanting to be. I had a hard time wanting to be anything other than a nurse.
It wasn’t until this August that I convinced myself that this wasn’t a failure in my rationality, but rather a difference in my basic drives. It’s around then, in the aftermath of the 2014 CFAR alumni reunion, that I wrote the following post.
I don’t believe in life-changing insights (that happen to me), but I think I’ve had one–it’s been two weeks and I’m still thinking about it, thus it seems fairly safe to say I did.
At a CFAR Monday test session, Anna was talking about the idea of having an “aura of destiny”–it’s hard to fully convey what she meant and I’m not sure I get it fully, but something like seeing yourself as you’ll be in 25 years once you’ve saved the world and accomplished a ton of awesome things. She added that your aura of destiny had to be in line with your sense of personal aesthetic, to feel “you.”
I mentioned to Kenzi that I felt stuck on this because I was pretty sure that the combination of ambition and being the locus of control that “aura of destiny” conveyed to me was against my sense of personal aesthetic.
Kenzi said, approximately [I don't remember her exact words]: “What if your aura of destiny didn’t have to be those things? What if you could be like…Samwise, from Lord of the Rings? You’re competent, but most importantly, you’re *loyal* to Frodo. You’re the reason that the hero succeeds.”
I guess this isn’t true for most people–Kenzi said she didn’t want to keep thinking of other characters who were like this because she would get so insulted if someone kept comparing her to people’s sidekicks–but it feels like now I know what I am.
So. I’m Samwise. If you earn my loyalty, by convincing me that what you’re working on is valuable and that you’re the person who should be doing it, I’ll stick by you whatever it takes, and I’ll *make sure* you succeed. I don’t have a Frodo right now. But I’m looking for one.
It then turned out that quite a lot of other people recognized this, so I shifted from “this is a weird thing about me” to “this is one basic personality type, out of many.” Notably, Brienne wrote the following comment:
Sidekick” doesn’t *quite* fit my aesthetic, but it’s extremely close, and I feel it in certain moods. Most of the time, I think of myself more as what TV tropes would call a “dragon”. Like the Witch-king of Angmar, if we’re sticking of LOTR. Or Bellatrix Black. Or Darth Vader. (It’s not my fault people aren’t willing to give the good guys dragons in literature.)
For me, finding someone who shared my values, who was smart and rational enough for me to trust him, and who was in a much better position to actually accomplish what I most cared about than I imagined myself ever being, was the best thing that could have happened to me.
She also gave me what’s maybe one of the best and most moving compliments I’ve ever received.
In Australia, something about the way you interacted with people suggested to me that you help people in a completely free way, joyfully, because it fulfills you to serve those you care about, and not because you want something from them… I was able to relax around you, and ask for your support when I needed it while I worked on my classes. It was really lovely… The other surprising thing was that you seemed to act that way with everyone. You weren’t “on” all the time, but when you were, everybody around you got the benefit. I’d never recognized in anyone I’d met a more diffuse service impulse, like the whole human race might be your master. So I suddenly felt like I understood nurses and other people in similar service roles for the first time.
Sarah Constantin, who according to a mutual friend is one of the most loyal people who exists, chimed in with some nuance to the Frodo/Samwise dynamic: “Sam isn’t blindly loyal to Frodo. He makes sure the mission succeeds even when Frodo is fucking it up. He stands up to Frodo. And that’s important too.”
Kate Donovan, who also seems to share this basic psychological makeup, added “I have a strong preference for making the lives of the lead heroes better, and very little interest in ever being one.”
Meanwhile, there were doubts from others who didn’t feel this way. The “we need heroes, the world needs heroes” narrative is especially strong in the rationalist community. And typical mind fallacy abounds. It seems easy to assume that if someone wants to be a support character, it’s because they’re insecure–that really, if they believed in themselves, they would aim for protagonist.
I don’t think this is true. As Kenzi pointed out: “The other thing I felt like was important about Samwise is that his self-efficacy around his particular mission wasn’t a detriment to his aura of destiny – he did have insecurities around his ability to do this thing – to stand by Frodo – but even if he’d somehow not had them, he still would have been Samwise – like that kind of self-efficacy would have made his essence *more* distilled, not less.”
Brienne added: “Becoming the hero would be a personal tragedy, even though it would be a triumph for the world if it happened because I surpassed him, or discovered he was fundamentally wrong.”
Usually, “this is a true and interesting thing about humans” is enough of a reason for me to write something. But I’ve got a lot of other reasons, this time.
I suspect that the rationality community, with its “hero” focus, drives away many people who are like me in this sense. I’ve thought about walking away from it, for basically that reason. I could stay in Ottawa and be a nurse for forty years; it would fulfil all my most basic emotional needs, and no one would try to change me. Because oh boy, have people tried to do that. It’s really hard to be someone who just wants to please others, and to be told, basically, that you’re not good enough–and that you owe it to the world to turn yourself ambitious, strategic, Slytherin.
Firstly, this is mean regardless. Secondly, it’s not true.
Samwise was important. So was Frodo, of course. But Frodo needed Samwise. Heroes need sidekicks. They can function without them, but function a lot better with them. Maybe it’s true that there aren’t enough heroes trying to save the world. But there sure as hell aren’t enough sidekicks trying to help them. And there especially aren’t enough talented, competent, awesome sidekicks.
If you’re reading this post, and it resonates with you… Especially if you’re someone who has felt unappreciated and alienated for being different… I have something to tell you. You count. You. Fucking. Count. You’re needed, even if the heroes don’t realize it yet. (Seriously, heroes, you should be more strategic about looking for awesome sidekicks. AFAIK only Nick Bostrom is doing it.) This community could use more of you. Pretty much every community could use more of you.
I’d like, someday, to live in a culture that doesn’t shame this way of being. As Brienne points out, “Society likes *selfless* people, who help everybody equally, sure. It’s socially acceptable to be a nurse, for example. Complete loyalty and devotion to “the hero”, though, makes people think of brainwashing, and I’m not sure what else exactly but bad things.” (And not all subsets of society even accept nursing as a Valid Life Choice.) I’d like to live in a world where an aspiring Samwise can find role models; where he sees awesome, successful people and can say, “yes, I want to grow up to be that.”
Maybe I can’t have that world right away. But at least I know what I’m reaching for. I have a name for it. And I have a Frodo–Ruby and I are going to be working together from here on out. I have a reason not to walk away.