Interesting! I'm way out in the middle of nowhere, and experience suggests that the greatest benefits of intellectual co-location happen with physical co-location as well. I wonder if there would be interest in a program with some overlap across airbnb or farm stays, where one visits a spot out in the woods with decent internet but few distractions, and stays for a while (a week or two sounds like a plausible guess to start iterating from) with a host who assumes a metacognitive role in the project that one is working on. It seems quite appealing from a hosting perspective -- doing a short-term cognitive job-shadow role like that for an expert thinker would be deeply enriching, and hosting many thinkers over the years would build a fascinating expertise in pattern-matching between them, crafting an ontology of how folks in a given field get stuck and un-stuck, etc.

And I don't think I'm the only prospective host who prefers a remote location because dealing with strangers frequently (as one must to live richly in a city) gets exhausting, yet enjoys deeper small-group interaction when it's available. There's also a social dynamic where visiting someone in the middle of nowhere gives the host greater control over how time is used, since excursions outside the homestead cost more travel time and thus warrant more careful planning. This dynamic seems like it could be quite helpful if the host's primary priority is to advance the success of the guest's project.

I'd like to do either side of this! Which I say in public to have an opportunity to advertise that https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MHqwi8kzwaWD8wEQc/would-you-like-me-to-debug-your-math remains open.

I've been offering various flavours of this to selected people for the past few years (using the normally ill-advised free option, but I don't super need to earn money currently and it feels good to ask people to pay it forward and do good for the world), with pretty good reviews. I'm not super looking to expand this currently, but might be open to testing out more people in a month or three, depending on where priorities fall and whether I think the person is doing unusually good doom reducing work.

I did a session yesterday with @moonlight, which went pretty well. I ended up consolidating some notes that seemed good to share with new assistants, and then he wrote the introduction he'd personally have preferred. 

I generally work out of google docs that serve as shared-external-working-memory, with multiple tabs.

Moonlight's Intro

[Written by the first thinking assistant working with Ray, writing here what I’d have liked to read first]

Important things:

• Ray is currently sick, so put some effort into speaking more softly and slowly.
• There is no interview or anything similar, you’ll begin assisting him straight away.
• By default, just watch him work (coding/planning/writing/operations), and occasionally give signs you’re still attentive, without interrupting.
• Write moment to moment observations which feel useful to you, as well as general thoughts, down in the Assistant Notes tab. This helps you feel more proactively involved and makes you focused on noticing patterns and ways in which you could be more useful as an assistant.
• The Journal tab is for his plans and thoughts about what to generally do. Read it as an overview.
• This Context tab is for generally useful information about what you should do and about relevant strategies and knowledge Ray has in mind. Reading this helps you get a more comprehensive view on what his ideal workflow looks like, and what your ideal contributions look like.

For the structure of this document:

• Collapse sections when reading. It helps traverse the document.
• This part has my thoughts for onboarding. Under it, you can find Ray’s onboarding section. Read these two first.
• The “Ray Facts” section has important information about logistics and operations. Currently it has only his work location. [edited out in this comment]
• In “Ray’s Metacognitive Engine” and below, you can find the strategies and knowledge I’ve mentioned above. You can read these after, they’re not mandatory at the very start.

Ray’s First Draft Intro Materials

Strategic Overview

Goal: End the acute risk period, and ensure a flourishing human future.

I’ve recently finished a bunch of grieving necessary to say “all right I’m ready to just level up into an Elon-Musk-but-with-empathy-and-cyborg-tools type”, as well as the minimum necessary pieces of a cognitive engine that (I think) is capable of doing so).

I want to be growing in capacity at an exponential rate, both in terms of my personal resources, and the resources available to the x-risk ecosystem that are accomplishing things I think need accomplishing.

This means having a number of resources that are compounding, that are synergistic, which include:

• Money (either mine, or ability to spend Lightcone’s)
• Skills
  • Meta personal skills, like ability to learn, and understand things, or be strategic
  • Meta interpersonal skills, such as the ability to outsource labor or make use of assistants,
  • Object level skills like programming, UI design, Event running
  • Ability to work with employees who can take on tasks I want done
• Capital
  • Relationships with people I work well with
  • Tools I can re-use

Things I actually do most days:

• Coding on LessWrong
• Coding on random other projects
• Planning my Cybercognition Agenda, which includes workshops, cybernetic tools, and upskilling people around me.
• UI design, trying to figure out important complex things I want people to interact with in a way that feels simple to them. 
• Thinking strategically about what needs to be done next

Instructions for Thinking Assistants

Things I would like you to do:

• By default, be quiet and attentive and just help me focus by being a real human who’s staring at me
• Develop skills for tackling sort of arbitrary ops or research or coding tasks, such that I can outsource small things to you.
• Advice
  • This is tricky because I have a good enough model of myself that a lot of advice isn’t that helpful. It’s still useful to have my blindspots pointed out. But, if I interrupt you (either with words or with a hand gesture) that probably means I want to move on to a different thread. (Ideally, you feel comfortable bringing up ideas, with no hard feelings if it doesn’t work out) 

I would like to end up with a series of if-then habits you can help me execute. I will mostly write these myself, but as you get to know me well enough to say useful things, you can make suggested-edits

From “Hire or become a Thinking Assistant”

• By default, be quietly but visibly attentive.
• Every now and then (~5-10 minutes, or when I look actively distracted), briefly check in (where if I'm in-the-zone, this might just be a brief "Are you focused on what you mean to be?" from them, and a nod or "yeah" from me).
• When I need to think something through, they rubber duck (i.e. listen as I talk out loud about it, and ask clarifying questions)
• Build a model of my thought process (partly by me explaining it to them, partly by observing, partly by asking questions)
• Ideally, notice when my thought process seems confused/disoriented/inefficient.
• Ideally, have a large repertoire of cognitive tools they can suggest if I seem to be missing them.
• Intelligent enough that they can pretty easily understand the gist of what I'm working on.
• Ability to pick things up from context so I don't need to explain things in too much detail.
• Ideally, when my bottlenecks are emotional, also be at least fairly emotionally attuned (i.e. project a vibe that helps me worth through it, or at least doesn't add extra friction or emotional labor demands from me), and ideally, basically be a competent therapist.
• In general, own the metacognition. i.e. be taking responsibility for keeping track of things, both on a minute-to-minute timescale, and the day-to-day or week-to-week timescale.
• Ability to get out of the way / quickly drop things if it doesn't turn out to be what I need, without it being a big deal. 

There are also important outside-the-container skillsets, such as:

• Be responsive in communication, so that it's easy to schedule with them. If it's too much of a pain to schedule, it kinda defeats the point.
• Potentially: proactively check in remotely during periods where I'm not actively hiring them. i.e. be a professional accountability buddy, maybe paid some base rate to briefly check in each day, with the ability to upsell into "okay today is a day that requires bigger metacognitive guns than Raemon has at the moment")

Even the minimum bar (i.e. "attentive body double") here is a surprisingly skilled position. It requires gentleness/unobtrusiveness, attentiveness, a good vibe. 

The skill ceiling, meanwhile, seems quite high. The most skilled versions of this are the sort of therapist or executive coach who would charge hundreds of dollars an hour. The sort of person who is really good at this tends to quickly find their ambitions outgrowing the role (same with good executive assistants, unfortunately).

Pitfalls

Common problems I've run into:

• Having trouble scheduling with people. If you want to specialize in this role, it's often important for people to contact you on a short timeline (i.e. I might notice I'm in a brainfoggy state and want someone to assist me like right now, or tomorrow), so, having a communication channel you check regularly so people can ping you about a job.
• Asking questions in a way that is annoying instead of helpful. Since the point is to be giving me more time, if I have to spend too much time explaining the situation to someone, it undoes the value of it. This requires either them being good at picking things up quickly without much explanation, or good at reading nonverbal cues that the current thread isn't worth it and we should move on.
• Spending too much time on unhelpful advice. Sometimes an assistant will have ideas that don't work out, and maybe push them more than appropriate. There's a delicate balance here because sometimes I am being avoidant or something and need advice outside of my usual wheelhouse, but generally if advice isn't feeling helpful, I think the assistant should back off and observe more and try to have a few other hypotheses about what to suggest if they feel that the assistee is missing something.
• Navigating weird dynamics around "having someone entirely optimized to help another person." Having this run smoothly, in a net helpful way, means having to actually be prioritizing my needs/goals in a way that would normally be pretty rude. If I constantly feel like there's social awkwardness / wariness about whether I'm making them feel bad, the whole thing is probably net negative. I think doing a good job of navigating this requires some nuance/emotional-skill on both parties, in terms of striking a vibe where it feels like you are productively collaborating.
  • (I think this likely works best when the person is really actively interested in the job "be a thinking assistant", as opposed to something they're doing because they haven't gotten traction on their real goals).

Ray’s Metacognitive Engine

• Twice a day, asking “what is the most important thing I could be working on and why aren’t I on track to deal with it?”
  • you probably want a more specific question (“important thing” is too vague). Three example specific questions (but, don’t be a slave to any specific operationalization)
    • what is the most important uncertainty I could be reducing, and how can I reduce it fastest?
    • what’s the most important resource bottleneck I can gain, or contribute to the ecosystem, and would gain me that resource the fastest?
    • what’s the most important goal I’m backchaining from?
• Have a mechanism to iterate on your habits that you use every day, and frequently update in response to new information
  • for me, this is daily prompts and weekly prompts, which are:
    • optimized for being the efficient metacognition I obviously want to do each day
    • include one skill that I want to level up in, that I can do in the morning as part of the meta-orienting (such as operationalizing predictions, or “think it faster”, or whatever specific thing I want to learn to attend to or execute better right now)
• The five requirements each fortnight:
  • be backchaining 
    • from the most important goals
  • be forward chaining 
    • through tractable things that compound
  • ship something 
    • to users every fortnight
  • be wholesome 
    • (that is, do not minmax in a way that will predictably fail later)
  • spend 10% on meta (more if you’re Ray in particular but not during working hours. During working hours on workdays, meta should pay for itself within a week)
• Correlates:
  • have a clear, written model of what you’re backchaining from
  • have a clear, written model of how you’re compounding
• The general problem solving approach:
  • breadth first
  • identify cruxes
  • connect inner-sim to cruxes / predictions
  • follow your heart
  • see how your predictions went
• Random ass skills
  • napping
  • managing working memory, innovating and applying on working memory tools
  • grieving
  • Generalizing

Skill I’m working on that hasn’t paid off yet but I believe in:

• At least once a day or so, when you notice a mistake or surprise, spent a couple minutes asking “how could I have thought that faster” (and periodically do deeper dives)
• each day/week, figure out what you’re confused or predictably going to tackle in a dumb way, and think in advance about how to be smart about it the first time

DM me if you're interested.

I, too am quite interested in trialing more people for roles on this spectrum.

FYI: I'm hiring for basically a thinking assistant, right now, for I expect 5 to 10 hours a week. Pay depending on skill-level. Open to in-person or remote.

If you're really good, I'll recommend you to other people who I want boosted, and I speculate that this could easily turn into a full time role.

If you're interested or maybe interested, DM me. I'll send you my current writeup of what I'm looking for (I would prefer not to post that publicly quite yet), and if you're still interested, we can do a work trial.

However, fair warning: I've tried various version of hiring people to support my metacognition over the past 5 years, and so far none of them have worked well enough that it was worth continuing. I've learned a bit about what I need each time, but a lot of this will probably come down to personal fit.

I've been testing this with @Épiphanie Gédéon  for a few months now, and it's really, really good for doing more work that's intellectually challenging. In my opinion, the most important sentence in the post is the fact that it doesn't help that much during peak performance moments, but we’re not at our peak that often. And so, it's super important. It’s really a big productivity boost, especially when doing cognitively demanding tasks or things we struggle to "eat the frog". So, I highly recommend it.

But the person involved definitely needs to be pretty intelligent to keep up and to make recommendations that aren’t useless. Sometimes, it can feel more like co-working, there are quite a few different ways it can work, more or less passive/active. But overall, generally speaking, we recommend trying it for at least a few days. 

It took me quite a while to take the plunge because there's a social aspect—this kind of thing isn’t very common in France. It’s not considered a real job. Although, honestly, it should be a real job for intellectual professions, in my opinion. And it’s not an easy job.

Another thought, though I don't actually have any experience with this, but mostly doing attentive silent listening/observing might also be useful for learning how the other person is doing research.

Like, if it seems boring to just observe and occasionally say sth, try to better predict how the person will think or so.

I'm interested in variants of this from both sides. Feel free to shoot me a DM and let's see if we can set something up.

I haven't had a good label to put on things like this but I've gravitated towards similar ways of work over the last 10-20 years, and I've very often found very good performance boosting effects, especially where compatibility and trust could be achieved.

I haven't actually tried this, but recently heard about focusbuddy.ai, which might be a useful ai assistant in this space.

Related: this LessWrong post by Simon Berens is an example of using a "body double".

I do things like this at times with my teams.

Important things:

• Don't think you need to solve the actual problem for them

• Do solve 'friction' for them as much as possible

• Do feel free to look up other sources so you can offer more perspective and to take off the load of having to find relevant info

• positive energy, attentive etc

• if they're functioning well just watch and listen while being interested and unobtrusive, at most very minor inputs if you're pretty sure it'll be helpful

If stuck at a crossroads ask them how long they think each path will take/ how hard it'll be, and give them feedback if you think they're wrong. Help them start working on one, people can get stuck for longer than it would take to actually do one option.

• if lost, methodically go through the different areas where the issue could be and methodically go through all the directions they could take for each area and in general. You don't need to think these up, but keep track of them and help guide towards picking apart the problem and solution spaces. This takes some mental load off.

I am interested in hiring a metacognitive assistant! If anyone's interested, please DM me :) 

(Quick note to people DMing me, I'm doing holidays right now and will followup in a week or so. I won't necessarily have slots/need for everyone expressing interest)

How would this differ from working with a friend/coworker who regularly checks in on you? (and vice versa)

I'd be curious if there is a good way to combine the LLM with human feedback. E.g. if you're on Facebook or whatever, the LLM could send that information to someone to have them "hold you accountable with a bit of their soul"

I saw somebody using one of the latest Google models for this. I forget the one, but it's the one that can see your screen as you type. It can be used to keep you focused. 

(Haven't researched it yet, so might not work very well)

I’m pretty optimistic that you could build limited-scope versions of this based on AI. Eg a Vscode plugin that observes you writing code, or a browser extension that observes you writing in Google Docs. Also plausible that the AI thinking assistant would be better than median human, or would soon reach that level.

I think the minimum viable "attentive body double + rubber duck" is something AI could implement right now. ChatGPT's voice mode would basically be fine at this if it:

In fact, there is an already existing implementation of this. James Campbell's ProctorAI allows an multimodal LLM to send "personalized messages" based on screenshots, and Campbell claims that:

In my experience, I tend not to break the rules because I can intuitively feel the AI watching me--just like how test-takers are much less likely to cheat when they can feel the proctor of an exam watching them.

It seems mostly successful at minimizing procrastination. I have not tried it though. The LLM also only observes the computer; you'll need to change the code if you want the LLM to observe (and hopefully minimize procrastination on) non-computer activities.

Staying on task, and being only accountable to myself are difficult for me, usually. The idea of a body double would, in my case, be useful. Having enjoyed teaching online for a few years I know often people want a tutor in person. Not for me any more. I'd be totally up for a virtual version of supporting another's work.