I've noticed that, by my standards and on an Eliezeromorphic metric, most people seem to require catastrophically high levels of faith in what they're doing in order to stick to it. By this I mean that they would not have stuck to writing the Sequences or HPMOR or working on AGI alignment past the first few months of real difficulty,without assigning odds in the vicinity of 10x what I started out assigning that the project would work. And this is not a kind of estimate you can get via good epistemology.
I mean, you can legit estimate 100x higher odds of success than the Modest and the Outside Viewers think you can possibly assign to "writing the most popular HP fanfiction on the planet out of a million contenders on your first try at published long-form fiction or Harry Potter, using a theme of Harry being a rationalist despite there being no evidence of demand for this" blah blah et Modest cetera. Because in fact Modesty flat-out doesn't work as metacognition. You might as well be reading sheep entrails in whatever way supports your sense of social licensing to accomplish things.
But you can't get numbers in the range of what I estimate to be something like 70% as the required threshold before people will carry on through bad times. "It might not work" is enough to force them to make a great effort to continue past that 30% failure probability. It's not good decision theory but it seems to be how people actually work on group projects where they are not personally madly driven to accomplish the thing.
I don't want to have to artificially cheerlead people every time I want to cooperate in a serious, real, extended shot at accomplishing something. Has anyone ever solved this organizational problem by other means than (a) bad epistemology (b) amazing primate charisma?
EDIT: Guy Srinivasan reminds us that paying people a lot of money to work on an interesting problem is also standardly known to help in producing real perseverance.
I'm a bit surprised that most of the previous discussion here was focused on the "okay, so how do you actually motivate people?" aspect of this post.
This post gave me a fairly strong "sit bolt upright in alarm" experience because of it's implications on epistemics, and I think those implications are sneaky and far reaching. I expect this phenomenon to influence people's ability to think and communicate, before you get to the point where you actually have a project that people are hitting the hard parts of.
People form models of what sort of things they can achieve, and what sort of projects to start, and how likely their friends are to succeed at things, and (I expect) this backpropagates through their entire information system.
The problem may not just affect the people on a given project – it could affect the people nearby (and the people nearby them in turn), in terms of what sort of feedback you can easily give each other.
I've struggled with deciding whether to give people feedback that I don't think their project is likely to work, when I nonetheless think the project is the right thing to be working on, either for EV reasons or longterm-growth-as-a-person reasons, i.e. their next project will benefit from the skills they're gaining here. I know there are some people who'd lean hard into the "information is a key bottleneck, definitely don't withhold info like that." And they may be right. But if so, that still leaves us with a deep, crucial question of how to integrate epistemics and actual success on hard, long problems that lets you actually win at the instrumental part.
(I don't think the "pay people a lot" is actually sufficient, although it obviously helps. I think lack-of-clear-path-to-victory can be demoralizing even if you have plenty of money – that seems to be where a lot of 20th century ennui comes from. Also, many of the key projects here are early-stage where it's just hard to convince people to give you enough money to escape scarcity mindset)
I notice I don't have a very explicit model of what's going on – this comment felt more like I was ranting than clearly explaining things, not sure how it comes across to others.
I hope to flesh this out (and hopefully make some empirical predictions) during the review phase.
(Cross-posted from Facebook.)
I've noticed that, by my standards and on an Eliezeromorphic metric, most people seem to require catastrophically high levels of faith in what they're doing in order to stick to it. By this I mean that they would not have stuck to writing the Sequences or HPMOR or working on AGI alignment past the first few months of real difficulty, without assigning odds in the vicinity of 10x what I started out assigning that the project would work. And this is not a kind of estimate you can get via good epistemology.
I mean, you can legit estimate 100x higher odds of success than the Modest and the Outside Viewers think you can possibly assign to "writing the most popular HP fanfiction on the planet out of a million contenders on your first try at published long-form fiction or Harry Potter, using a theme of Harry being a rationalist despite there being no evidence of demand for this" blah blah et Modest cetera. Because in fact Modesty flat-out doesn't work as metacognition. You might as well be reading sheep entrails in whatever way supports your sense of social licensing to accomplish things.
But you can't get numbers in the range of what I estimate to be something like 70% as the required threshold before people will carry on through bad times. "It might not work" is enough to force them to make a great effort to continue past that 30% failure probability. It's not good decision theory but it seems to be how people actually work on group projects where they are not personally madly driven to accomplish the thing.
I don't want to have to artificially cheerlead people every time I want to cooperate in a serious, real, extended shot at accomplishing something. Has anyone ever solved this organizational problem by other means than (a) bad epistemology (b) amazing primate charisma?
EDIT: Guy Srinivasan reminds us that paying people a lot of money to work on an interesting problem is also standardly known to help in producing real perseverance.