The times I was able to get people to do things that they felt were too unlikely to commit to were largely about lowering the emotional costs of failure. The context is a bit different, but it seems likely that some of the same factors apply.
Using “writing HPMoR” as an example, there’s more than one thing failure could be taken to mean. One is “I tested a high risk high reward idea, and it didn’t pan out. I learned something useful about what kinds of things I can’t do (right away, at least), and it still strikes me as having been worth attempting, given what I knew at the time. If I keep trying high risk high reward ideas one of them is likely to pay out, because the idea that I’m limited by what social expectations would see as “modest” isn’t even worth taking seriously”. A completely different thing it could mean is “I was arrogant to think I had a chance at this. I learned nothing on the object level because I already knew I couldn’t do it, but on the meta level I learned that I was wrong to set this aside and hope. In hindsight, it was a mistake that never was worth trying in the first place, and if I keep trying high risk high rewards things I’m just going to keep failing because social expectations of what I’m capable of are *right*”. The people with the latter anticipation are going to be less thrilled about flipping that coin with a 50% chance of success because the other 50% hurts a lot more.
The former mindset *sounds* a lot better, and people are going to want to say “yeah, that one sounds right! I believe *that* one!” even when their private thoughts tend towards the latter mindset. If you try to get someone in the latter category to act like they’re in the former category, you’re going to run into motivation problems. You’re going to hear “You’re right, and I want to… I just can’t find the motivation”.
In order to get people to shift from “failure means I should be less confident and try less” to “failure means this particular one didn’t pan out, and it’s still worth trying more”, you have to be able to engage with (and pass the ‘ideological turing test’ of) their impulses to take failure as indicative of a larger problem. There is definitely a skill to this, and it can be tough when you can plainly see that the right answer is to “just try it”. At the same time, it’s a skill that can be learned and it does work for opening things up for change.
Good point. Note that gambling has the added difficulty in that it's emotionally adversarial - the casino/bookie is setting the game and environment to confuse the player's estimates of success probability and magnitude. Interviewing probably has a little of this in that many interviewers are more interested in making themselves feel smart than in hiring the candidates that will contribute most.
In any case, focusing on someone's motivation and their perception of the distribution of successes and failures should be secondary to analysis of... (read more)
(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.