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What can EA learn from Scouting
epistemic status: random notes for writing something more structured in the future
After EA fUnconference in Berlin, I'm thinking more and more about what we can learn from the scouting movement for purpose of community building/cooperation. Some elements characteristic of scouting (note, it's a rough idea, I don't think all of them are worth reproducing):
EDIT: to clarify (as I'm afraid now in this chaotic draft this may be misunderstood) this is not a list of things I observed on fUnconference. There there was only a partial implementation of the 'small groups' idea, as indicated in the text. Everything else is my memories from scouting times, and I never observed them in any EA group.
Coping with being average: local group. If you want to produce some content like writing, you're very likely to take popular writers as a baseline. But in times of the Internet, those are super-high-performers from the far end of the distribution. You and I are just not as good them (I'm 99% sure the reader is not in top 1%).
This might make you lose motivation. You will produce less then your reference point. Your content will feel medicore. You will get orders of magnitude smaller audience.
Idea how to cope better: instead of taking the whole internet, take a random sample of 100 people from your reference group and select top achievers (in the desired area) from this 100. They will probably be only slightly better than you.
A simple mechanism partially emulating this random sampling is your local group.
Comparing yourself to people who are closer to you on performance axis will probably be more productive. They might have struggled with similar problems as you only recently. They might have some tricks that are applicable in your case. You have higher chance of reaching their level 2 years from now.
In other words, if you want to be a better writer, aspire to be like the best writer in your local EA group, not like EY or Scott Alexander.
Another method is to be the best (or most patient, or most thorough) writer in your particular domain, or in general being the pareto-best in the world.
That's an interesting post, thanks. But I think you can bring value with your creations even if you're neither pareto optimal nor one-dimension top performer. So if you write scifi stories, you might still write some interesting stuff and deliver inspiring idea even if you don't have unique mixture of non-usual-sci-fi-writer traits in any tangible sense. You're not the best skateboard-scifi writer. You're just an average scifi writer and it's fine. So my point is in this case you might still need motivation. Maybe to develop your unique style or hit the niche market in the future. But if from the very beginning you compare yourself to superhumans boosted to the right side of the distribution by their unique genome or other irreproducible factors, you might never even start.
Another technique is to compare yourself to your past self.
I'm often dissatisfied with my writing. But when I look back at stuff that I wrote six months ago, I can't help but notice how much better I've become.
The caveat here is that comparing myself to people like Scott Alexander gives me some direction. Comparing myself to an earlier version of myself doesn't give me that direction. Instead, it gives me a sort of energy/courage to keep on going.
Bayesian Signaling: good way to think about signaling is handcrafting a piece of evidence, that for the other person will be objectively strong evidence for the claim that you're making. Hearing X saying "I'm pretty smart" is a weak evidence for the hypothesis "X is smart". Seeing a Harvard's degree with X's name on it is much stronger evidence. Hearing X saying "I'm a millionaire" is a weak evidence for the hypothesis "X is a millionaire". Receiving a 10000$ gift from them is much stronger evidence.
Thought experiment: Can question answering language model without memory, instantiated separately for every session (like GPT-3) be pursuing a goal? Does such setup exclude agency? ----Imagine you put thousand super-geniuses in prison, each in separate cell. You will call them in random order to interrogation room and always ask only one question, listen to the answer and send them back. Each person will be called only once.----- Super-geniuses are allowed to devise a strategy before you lock them. Their goal is to manipulate you to release them. Will they manage? If they are intelligent enough, the fact that each one answers only one question without knowing how many others were interrogated before and what their answers were shouldn't be a unworkable problem.
Video Games protocol: I like video games. Some of them are really life-changing stories. I have some titles on my list that have the potential to be really cool adventures. However, I'm hesitant to try them due to some considerations:
I'm the most concerned with the last point right now. I have some ideas to manage that better, and I'm open to new ones:
Playing in the morning before work runs the risk of being late to work a bit more often than otherwise, especially since you play longer than planned. Five more minutes five times might make you ten minutes late to work, so you didn't really have a good reason to stop that first time . . . and by the time you really needed to stop it was habit.
Well, for me 'logging in to work after 10AM' seems much worse than 'starting to get ready to sleep after 10PM'. It's a very natural and strong Schelling fence. Therefore the idea to play in the mornings rather than nights.