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Some generalizable piece of advice from HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION:
USE CONSULTANTS
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I’m a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over youtube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head “I will always check for consultants when i’m assigned a task”
Does... he have any advice on how to find good consultants? This disagrees so much with my experience that I am confused. The difference might be that he either works on stuff that has many more people with expertise he can consult, or that he has some consultant-finding skill I am lacking.
1Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
"Make the biggest cake." -> discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
"Do good management." -> very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren't aren't necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
"Invent a (good) new field of philosophy." -> much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn't in recent memory (to override the fact that it's at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it's an academic field, so quite competitive.
"Write good rationalist fanfiction." -> impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.
1I'm very sold that it makes sense to talk to the cake size champion in exactly the scenario he described. Throughout that document (which I love and have posted repeatedly to Redwood slack) the examples are constantly insane, and it's hard for me to tell how much that's because Mr Beast productions are actually insane and how much it's because he's using weird examples.
Personally I am reading him as saying "if you're doing something for the first time, talk with someone who has done it before".
Seems noteworthy that in the two examples:
- "the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake"
- Mr. Beast himself
Neither of these two people are people who you'll find at a consulting firm. Ie maybe the attitude prescribed here is less "go look for people who market themselves as consultants" and more "go find someone who's among the best in the world at the thing you're trying to do and pay them to talk to you". That sounds like a good idea to me if you can tell who's good and if they're affordable.
1I 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.
1I once said that I'm bad at writing, and recently I realized it's probably because my natural writing style is a strange kind of rambling, and it takes a significant amount of effort for me to polish it to the writing-style-I-want-to-have, and a part of me doesn't want to publish the rambling writing style I have, because it stands out too much, at least in a LessWrong shortform feed.[1]
Within the past ~3-6 months, I did a bunch of stream-of-consciousness daily, as a huge part of how I think, and without external feedback on my writing style (like a blogger would get), I developed a bunch of internal jargon, and also possibly drifted away from what I mean by things in some respects, etc. Which means I don't get to practice normal prose much, even if I still technically write a lot.
- ^
no, I'm not using the rambling style here, if you're wondering
- I recently came up with a particular way of thinking about my mind: there are many relatively independent subsystems in my mind that
- are particular quirks in human cognition that I can take advantage of, and
- always watch and react to observations and sometimes my own thoughts; I usually can't hide from them
- For example, here are some of mine, with made-up names:
- the "Magic Brain Juice" one, which automates any repetitive enough trigger-action pairs
- the "naive RL learner" one, which reinforces rewarding experiences and stuff
- the "associative thinking" one, which makes random associations of various concepts in my mind whenever I'm not focusedly thinking about something, and notifies my consciousness when it finds something novel
- the "competence-identity" one, which tries to maintain (the appearance of) my competence, and emotionally fuels me whenever it doesn't match that
- the "emotional validation" one, which craves social attention
- ... and so on and so forth
- I expect this framing to generalize to some extent to other people, and I also expect it to matter even more to rationalists, because some rats do a kind of renovation in their mind, and in the process ignore these "subsystems"
- Inspirations:
- Kaj Sotala's IFS (which helps me think about "subsystems" generally)
- "We are agents who cannot simply act because every action is accompanied by self-modification." - Magic Brain Juice
- ... which motivates "some subsystems are always in my mind observing me doing stuff"
- Autopilot Thinking
I found that listing things as a hierarchy, like a taxonomy, immensely dissolved my confusion about what to do in both AI safety and my personal life. I had been picturing the AI safety field as something vague and huge and confusing, but breaking it down into categories and subcategories made it much easier to think about. Not only that made it clear simply because writing things down is helpful, but the hierarchy feature itself chunks/abstracts things to make it easier on my working memory. In hindsight it feels really obvious, but the effect was much larger than I expected.
Also, here's my AI safety taxonomy. I wrote it only for myself so there may be some confusing parts and some missing here and there
taxonomy
- ai safety
- technical ai safety
- prosaic ai safety
- persona selection model
- interp
- mech interp
- activation oracles
- j-space
- model diffing
- scalable oversight
- automated ai alignment
- agent foundations
- learning-theoretic agenda
- natural abstractions
- synthesizing standalone world-models
- embedded agency
- decision theory
- ai control
- evals
- meta-philosophy
- brain-like agi
- corrigibility
- prosaic ai safety
- non-technical ai safety work
- forecasting
- buy time
- politics ...
- impact on outside society
- recruit more people
- persuade more people, i.e. advocacy
- politics
- international coordination
- funding
- awareness of cybersecurity
- awareness of what other "ai safety" people are doing?
- awareness of which ai lab is winning the race?
- taking care of the rationality community
- technical ai safety
useful questions to ask are:
- which of these is [some content about ai safety] related to?
- which is missing from this list because of [some content about ai safety]?
- when i contribute to ai safety, which of these do i target?
Various 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?)