Heroic Responsibility
23Raemon
4johnswentworth
9Max H
5the gears to ascension
2johnswentworth
1Three-Monkey Mind
1Three-Monkey Mind
3Nate Showell
2Wei Dai
New Comment
I think this part of Heroic Responsibility isn't too surprising/novel to people. Obviously the business owner has responsibility for the business. The part that's novel is more like:
If I'm some guy working in legal, and I notice this hot potato going around, and it's explicitly not my job to deal with it, I might nonetheless say "ugh, the CEO is too busy to deal with this today and it's not anyone else's job. I will deal with it." Then you go to each department head, even if you're not even a department head you're a lowly intern (say), and say "guys, I think we need to decide who's going to deal with this."
And if their ego won't let them take advice from an intern, you might also take it as your responsibility to figure out how to navigate their ego – either by making them feel like it was their own idea, or by threatening to escalate to the CEO if they don't get to it themselves.
A great example of this, staying with them realm of "random Bureaucracy", I got from @Elizabeth:
E. D. Morel was a random bureaucrat at a shipping company in 1891. He noticed that his company was shipping guns and manacles into the Congo, and shipping rubber and other resources back out to Britain.
It was not Morel's job to notice that this was a bit weird.
It was not Morel's job to notice that that weirdness was a clue, and look into those clues. And then find out that what was happening was, weapons were being sent to the Congo to forcibly steam resources at gunpoint.
It was not his job to make it his mission to raise awareness of the Congo abuses and stop them.
But he did.
...
P.S. A failure mode of rationalists is to try to take Heroic responsibility for everything, esp. in a sort of angsty way that is counterproductive and exhausting. It's also a failure mode to act as if only you can possibly take Heroic responsibility, rather than trying to model the ecosystem around you and the other actors (some of whom might be Live Players who are also taking Heroic Responsibility, some of whom might be sort of local actors following normal incentives but are still, like, part of the solution)
There is nuance to when and how to do Heroic Responsibility well.
One thing filed away in my head for another post at some point: even if you're trying to be a hufflepuff, and don't really want to be in charge of other people or yourself, if you want to be a high-value hufflepuff you still need to take heroic responsibility pretty often. Like, from e.g. the business owner's perspective, the really high value employees are the ones who can take heroic responsibility for the tasks they're given and get them done whatever it takes without the business owner having to allocate further attention.
1There was some discussion about heroic responsibility here not too long ago. One aspect / behavior that some people (incorrectly IMO) attribute to heroic responsibility is that it is a justification for deontology violations in order to accomplish whatever goal you have.
My take is that it is more like the opposite: the thing you're describing here is mostly just ordinary high-agency behavior / executive responsibility. Where heroic responsibility comes in is that it says that you're supposed to wield that agency and level of execution continuously and at all levels of meta (using comprehensive / non-naive consequentialism) until the job is actually done. It also includes tracking and recognizing when to give up, and making that call - in your example, maybe this means stepping back and realizing that actually running the kind of ads you were trying to run are not effective or not worth the cost in the first place, or that your car dealership is headed for bankruptcy regardless of what happens with the ads. Furthermore, taking heroic responsibility means that you're obligated to do all this without stepping outside the bounds of deontology or slipping into invalid / motivated reasoning.
1Heroic responsibility is when you say "it doesn't matter who is allegedly in charge; it's my (mass co-op, usually) game to win, so I'm going to play it". where, even if you're in a big co-op game lobby, and everyone is trying to achieve the same shared goal (eg, win the raid, succeed at hanabi, not die from AI, get lunch, whatever), then your actions are what you have locus of control over, so it's up to you to steer as hard as you can towards the shared outcome actually occurring. This applies less to competitive games because it's more obvious there that if you want to win, you just need to go hard. It applies less to being officially in charge of commanding others, because again, relatively obvious that you need to go hard. the unusual thing is applying it to everything, seeing your whole life as a single "get all the things I desire, including the desires that care about others" game, and realizing that means that just waiting for others to dispense the right items to win will not get you best probability of winning.
And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say "it doesn't matter what role I have", and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.
The idea/claim that heroic responsibility is important and high-value for people not in leadership positions is separate from the concept of heroic responsibility. At some point I do want a post explaining/arguing why hufflepuffs need heroic responsibility, but that post works a lot better if the argument is cleanly separated from the concept.
Is “Hufflepuff” (as a personality type) described anywhere concisely and more or less completely on LW? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbdP8hD2AcKcdSsgF/project-hufflepuff-planting-the-flag seems like the closest thing to an explainer, but it seems incomplete. (https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility is exactly the sort of explainer that I’d want for Hufflepuff.)
And so, this post seems like a very bad example for some kinds of mind, because heroic responsibility is when you say “it doesn’t matter what role I have”, and so people who are blocked on imagining themselves as a business owner/leader would be put off by this instead of getting it.
Yeah, it’s not particularly heroic if you’re The Guy, even if it means you’re the one putting in 70-hour weeks fixing stuff that crops up to keep the business running because if you don’t fix it, nobody will, and the business will collapse.
Meanwhile, https://www.greaterwrong.com/w/heroic-responsibility — that I got to by clicking on the tag above the post that reads “Heroic Responsibility” — seems significantly clearer about the heroism aspect, and I don’t think having read HPMOR ages ago means it’s all that extra understandable compared to Joe Q. Public.
It's worth distinguishing between epistemic and instrumental forms of heroic responsibility. Shapley values are the mathematically precise way of apportioning credit or blame for an outcome among a group of people. Heroic responsibility as a belief about one's own share of credit or blame is a dark art of rationality, since it involves explicitly deviating from the Shapley value assignment in one's beliefs about credit or blame. But taking heroic responsibility as an action, while acknowledging that you're not trying to be mathematically precise in your credit assignment, can still be useful as a way of solving coordination problems.
It means that if a problem isn't actually going to get solved by someone else, then it's my job to make sure it gets solved, no matter who's job it is on paper.
There is a countless number of problems in the world that are not actually going to get solved, by anyone. This seems to imply that it's my job to make sure they all get solved. This seems absurd and can't be what it means, but what is the actual meaning of heroic responsibility then?
For example, does it mean that I should pick the problem to work on that has the highest EV per unit of my time, or pick the problem that I have the biggest comparative advantage in, or something like that? But then how does "heroic responsibility" differ from standard EA advice and what is "heroic" about it? (Or maybe it was more heroic and novel, at a time when there was no standard EA advice?) Anyway I'm pretty confused.
Curated and popular this week