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I think that the amount of contributions a person can contribute to discussions like on LessWrong, and cognitive interpersonal activities in general, is not only determined by intelligence, but also how unique their perspective of the world is, or how much thought-patterns they have that others don’t, or how different they think from the others, etc. Audrey Tang joining the AI safety field is an example (it feels like to me she does have some wacky intuitions that could help the field see things in more different ways, aside from being very smart).
Related: The bar is lower than you think
The rare gift is having deep understanding and experience in a unique outsider domain, while also understanding how to extract, explain, and apply insights from that domain in a rational way.
I’m very bad at writing and reaching out to people, and this is the single reason stopping me from making an impact in this space. I have been trying hard to figure out why I’m bad at writing and talking and reaching out to people for a very long time (even writing this shortform was difficult for me) and here are some hypothesized reasons why:
- I’m not a native English user
- I’m perfectionist about writing style, trying to make it so that the writing style is “native” enough according to my intuition
- I haven’t talked to English people that much so I don’t really know the conversational style
- I haven’t talked much to people in general so I don’t even know which information in particular is important to deliver
- I'm generally very anxious about actively talking to people I don't know
- I procrastinate a lot recently
Having written the reasons out I expect them to be a one-time issue, and that someone helping me out to resolve these issues has a chance of being counterfactually impactful without spending much time
I relate to this. (I'm also not a native English user! and I feel we are similar in the other points too.)
For me, a mix of the following made me slightly better at writing: reading Babble, reading about importance of deliberate practice, writing about unimportant things (high stakes writing would give me way too much pressure at the beginning that procrastination immediately kicks in), and sometimes being confident enough that I think even writing a poor version of the thing I wanted to communicate is a net positive to the person I'm talking to or society in general (compared to predictably procrastinating if I try to improve the writing)
For reaching out to people, i'm not too sure which kind of reaching out do you mean.
1
1I mean reaching out to strangers in general. And also, I expect (75%) the problem to be solved by the time I reach 10 cycles in the "actively reaching out to a stranger" <-> "hearing from them" feedback loop.
Writing is like a muscle that you have to train. Don't wait for the perfect opportunity to write. Start writing now, so that when the perfect opportunity arrives, you already have the skill.
Thinking about the right topic, worrying about the audience -- those are just ways to procrastinate. Forget it. Write about anything that is on your mind now. Someone may like it, most people probably won't; that's life. Keep doing things and gaining experience. When you get the experience, then perhaps consider the audience and the topic.
There is no reason why you shouldn't write both in English and your native language. (Two different blogs, perhaps.)
Imagine an ideal reader, and write for them. If someone matches this profile, maybe they will get lucky and find your article. You can't make everyone happy anyway.
tl;dr - it's practice first, success maybe later
1Do you consider yourself good at writing in your native language? If so, I'd encourage you to maybe try out this technique I advocated for.
1Various ways of how to integrate worldviews between rationalists that I thought about:
- Make arguments about various claims, find flaws in claims, and repeat
- Find a double crux and focus on that instead
- Dump info that formed your worldview and/or intuition, as in rationalist mind melding
- Give a bunch of various examples about concepts in your ontology to hammer them down
- Make predictions about very concrete questions such that common ground is found even if ontologies are different
- Document what the other must know when arguing with you (including your fundamental assumptions), and reference it to the person you're arguing with so that they have the prerequisites
I do find myself think about how this is such a high-trust vulnerable thing to do (especially the info dump and concept assumptions), if anyone has even really done such in 'public'. Mine would probably have so many "childhood experiences" narrativized, certain people blown up into some platonic ideal of patterns, especially listing out "this annoyed me so I didn't want to associate" is pretty vulnerable. I don't disagree with this comment at all so it's interesting that I think this I guess.
I have an intuition that the mud-rock spectrum is a very important concept to pay attention to, and the rationality community leaned too hard on muddiness and muddy rationalist techniques, and that this is underemphasized among rationalists. (for example, metacognitive strategies, a CFAR situation, the fact that you have to quickly replace some of your assumptions as you become a rationalist, the quick development of rationality and foundational beliefs on LessWrong in general, ...) I personally feel like some of the framing of the concept in the mud-rock post isn't quite right (muddiness/rockiness probably isn't best described as a state of mind), but the conceptual understanding behind it basically is. In a very rough summary, things are "muddier" when they change deeper/more foundational beliefs/assumptions, and things are "rockier" when they harden them instead. I think that paranoia is a good step in the right direction here, and that people should develop more rationality techniques in the general rocky direction. (something something Chesterton's fence?)