tlevin's Shortform

tlevin

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Biggest disagreement between the average worldview of people I met with at EAG and my own is something like "cluster thinking vs sequence thinking," where people at EAG were often like "but even if we get this specific policy/technical win, doesn't it not matter unless you also have this other, harder thing?" and I was often more like, "Well, very possibly we won't get that other, harder thing, but still seems really useful to get that specific policy/technical win, here's a story where we totally fail on that first thing and the second thing turns out to matter a ton!"

1Anthony DiGiovanni2y

I'm confused as to why this is inconsistent with sequence thinking. This sounds like identifying a mechanistic story for why the policy/technical win would have good consequences, and accounting for that mechanism in your model of the overall value of working on the policy/technical win. Which a sequence thinker can do just fine.

1tlevin2y

Sequence thinking can totally generate that, but it seems like it is also prone to this kind of stylized simple model where you wind up with too few arrows in your causal graph and then inaccurately conclude that some parts are necessary and others aren't helpful.

I worry there's kind of a definitional drift going on here. I guess Holden doesn't give a super clean definition in the post, but AFAICT these quotes get at the heart of the distinction:

Sequence thinking involves making a decision based on a single model of the world ...

Cluster thinking – generally the more common kind of thinking – involves approaching a decision from multiple perspectives (which might also be called “mental models”), observing which decision would be implied by each perspective, and weighing the perspectives in order to arrive at a final... (read more)

tlevin's Shortform

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tlevin's Shortform

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