I might start a newsletter on the economics of individual small businesses. Does anyone know anyone who owns or manages e.g. a restaurant, or a cafe, or a law firm, or a bookstore, or literally any kind of small business? Would love intros to such people so that I can ask them a bunch of questions about e.g. their main sources of revenue and costs or how they make pricing decisions.

I'd be interested in doing something resembling an interview/podcast, where my main role is to facilitate someone else talking about their models (and maybe asking questions that get them to look closer at blurry parts of their own models). If you have something you want to talk/write about, but don't feel like making a whole post about it, consider asking me to do a dialogue with you as a relatively low-effort way to publish your takes.

Some potential topics:

• What's your organization trying to do? What are some details about the world that are informing your current path to doing that?
• What are you spending your time on, and why do you think it's useful?
• What's a common mistake (or class of mistake) you see people making, and how might one avoid it?

So, if you have something you want to talk about, and want to recruit me as an interlocutor/facilitator, let me know.

Took APCS (Java 101-102) in high school (culminating with coding Tetris in Java), read through Diveintopython3.net, done a bunch of miscellaneous programs in Python, lots of experience in Linux.

[APPRENTICE]:

For a bunch of these, the minimum viable product for mentoring me is a combination of pointing me to books/textbooks and checking in on me to make sure I actually do it.

Some things I'd like mentorship on:

• People willing to review my writing, and accountability on spewing out a bunch of blog posts. (and maybe on starting an actual novel!)
• Operations. I've run a couple large projects in the past, including a group house, and there's a lot I can do better. Would love to hear from people who have run group houses or organizations in the past.
• Economics: I have most of the 101-level stuff, but could use some more specific knowledge on labor econ. Especially curious about (banking) regulation.
• Math: Besides teaching myself calculus and linear algebra, I haven't really gotten into much complicated math; someone able to point me at more advanced stuff, ideally alignment-relevant, would be much appreciated.
• Programming. Ideally, I'd go through a bunch of projects you suggest in Python, with you available for occasional debugging/querying, with the goal of eventually being able to do more technical alignment work.

Day 1, adding ~500 words of nuance.

• A lot of these models are “this was my lived experience, it seems to generalize a fair bit”. I sent out an interest form to see how much demand there was for something like this, as a way to test whether it did in fact generalize a bunch to other people, and it got a lot of responses. 
• Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”. I did this! It sucked!
  • Solo productivity is hard. Creating systems that help you get work/studying done every day, without external deadlines and check-ins, is really difficult. Also, I have pretty bad ADHD, which means that my default for extended periods of working alone involves forgetting to eat, take my ADHD medication, or do anything productive whatsoever during the day.
  • I care a lot about seeing friends, and don’t really have a lot of ways to do that, especially because most of my really good friends are scattered across the US and Europe. 
  • Being stuck at home is corrosive for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent. Some of this is due to the loss of the counterfactual environment, and some of this is due to specific details about people’s home lives. 
• Agency is a pretty important thing. By default, it gets crushed. Giving people power over their own lives, and encouraging them when they do weird things, helps turn them into the kind-of-person who comes up with weird new things to do that would help their lives, and overall makes the world a better place.
  • A lot of people who have the potential to do a lot of great things have their creativity and agency crushed by The System and their parents. The K-12 education system isn’t centrally designed to do any one thing, but the result of the system is that your creativity and independence is crushed. The parents of really smart kids can be slightly obtuse and limiting at best and controlling and manipulative at worst. I know people who were forced to do double-digit hours of test prep every week.
  • Living on your own, and not being forced to adhere to (arbitrary) external goals and standards, does a lot to help people acquire the generalized skills of actually making their own decisions and guiding their own paths and stuff. I have a lot of other thoughts on agency, some of which can be seen here, but “internal vs. external locus of control” is pretty central to the thing here. The key is getting people to see themselves as agents in the world taking actions according to their own desires/ambitions, as opposed to executing strategies that other people/their broader culture has set out for them. Again, I need to write more about this, but this is a good first pass.
• Things like coworking are pretty good for long-term productivity.
  • The key is social accountability. I’d estimate that, for me, having all of my work hours be coworking of some form as opposed to [puttering around and occasionally doing productive things] results in doubling my actual output. Being in a work/living environment where coworking is a readily available default would then be a huge improvement on its own.

Super rough expansion of the first couple bullet points, Day 0:

Intro:

• Why write this?
  • I’m writing this post because I have a bunch of models about group houses, minors, and the combination of the two that I think other people might be interested in. I also want to have some publicly available thing I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.
• Short version of what this was.
  • Ascension Beta was a month-long experimental group house I ran in October 2022, with participants aged 16-22. It was intended primarily as a test of the below models (to see if a larger, longer-running version was worthwhile) and a chance to practice running a group house of this type, working out the major kinks before running a longer version. 
  • The major goals of Ascension were to give residents social accountability, agency over their environment, and community.
• Why run Ascension (short version)
  • Because I wanted it to exist (so I could live there), other people wanted it to exist for the same reason, and nobody else was going to step up and make it happen. I had a lot of models about agency, environment, and productivity, and in particular a specific kind of environment I wanted to live in. However, it didn’t exist, especially not for minors. I also hypothesized that the people I had met who were similar to me would also want this to exist, and that was borne out by the evidence. There are a bunch of reasons for why Ascension provides value to these people, and that’s what most of this post is about.

Models:

• Most important model here: it worked. Everything below is mostly informed by that, and the beta was a really good way to develop those models.
  • Before I ran the beta, I was pretty uncertain about some of these models. My models on high school and agency were fairly strong, but everything about how something like Ascension would actually function in practice was fairly blurry. However, the beta, while janky, proved that something like Ascension could work, and that it was likely for some longer/larger version to be more effective.
• High school, as an institution, is really bad.
  • It’s a waste of time that destroys your agency and love for learning. I could go in-depth on the specific reasons why it’s so bad, but for now, just keep in mind that the default societal path here is four years in hell that takes up as much of your Slack as possible. This means that really smart/ambitious people, the kind that you meet at programs like Atlas or SPARC, often have to find their own ways out of high school to actually do the things they care about. There mostly does not exist infrastructure to support alternate pathways for these people. There are small bits of it, notably Emergent Ventures for funding your endeavors during this time, but the majority of the things that you would have on the default pathway of high school + college (housing, peers, “learning”) have to be found for yourself; most of the time, the hand-rolled solutions that you find will fail you.
• Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”. I did this! It sucked!
  • Solo productivity is hard.
  • Going insane due to loneliness.
  • Being stuck at home is really really bad for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent.

I'm writing up my models on why my pet project, Ascension, is a good idea. This is the outline. As I expand the post, I'll add the incremental bits as comments.

Intro:

• Why write this?
• Short version of what this was.
• Why run Ascension (short version)

Models:

• Most important model here: it worked. Everything below is mostly informed by that, and the beta was a really good way to develop those models.
• High school, as an institution, is absolutely dog shit.
  • Signaling race to the bottom that sucks up all of your time.
• Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”
  • I did this! It fucking sucked!
• Agency is a pretty important thing. By default, it gets crushed. Giving people power over their own lives, and encouraging them when they do weird things, helps turn them into the kind-of-person who comes up with weird new things to do that would help their lives, and overall makes the world a better place.
  • A lot of people who have the potential to do a lot of great things have their creativity and agency crushed by The System and their parents.
• Things like coworking are pretty good for long-term productivity.
• There are a bunch of other systems that can be implemented individually and on the scale of groups to make people more productive. Think to-do lists, or morning standup meetings.
• Dealing with minors, in general, fucking sucks.
  • You have to be accountable to parents
  • They don’t have rights under the law to do a bunch of things
  • You’re exposed to a lot more liability in general
  • Also, a lot of people just, like, don’t really want to deal with most teenagers that much?
• As a result of this, the housing situation for minors in the bay is close to nonexistent.
  • Arcadia, the closest thing to Ascension that exists, is pretty good, but not aimed at the exact kind of things I care about here, and also they don’t exactly have a no-minor policy, but they do have strict scrutiny around allowing minors.
• There exist these weird niche communities around really smart, young, promising people, like Atlas/ESPR/SPARC and EV.
  • It’s fucking incredible for people in those communities to spend time with other people in those communities. Yet, because when you’re selecting on the scale of 1/1,000 or 1/10,000, you end up pretty far on average from other people like you.
  • Also, it’s useful for people to have some way of getting into these groups. 
• The Bay community in general is fucking amazing, and being in a house that is part of that larger community is amazing.
  • Having people well into their career who can serve as mentorship-ish figures is also really good.
• Weird rituals and group activities are awesome! People don’t get enough of those by default.
  • Having weird rationalist customs of betting and such, as group norms, is pretty cool.
• Also, having a tight-knit group of people you live with, who you very much respect and know well, is great for social stuff.
• Dath ilani coordination, where people choose Stag as a group.
• Dragon Army was cool and all, but MAN do I not have the leadership knowledge/ability to run something with that much centralization of power. 
  • As it happens, neither did Duncan, according to him.
  • You’ll also note that the Dragon Army Theory post was mostly Duncan explaining different group dynamics problems, and trying to fix it with his group house, whereas this is more me explaining a bunch of societal problems that lead to people misjudging minors for this sort of thing.
• For the demographic of teenagers who are likely to be at Ascension, the risks involved aren’t necessarily what you’d think of. They don’t drink, they don’t take (depressant) drugs. The actual risks that I’d be worried about are people getting depressed and romantic drama.
  • Though, a large part of this is due to me being pretty selective with who I invite.
• Running stuff like “everyone in the house gets together to work on blog posts” results in many more blog posts being written than there would be otherwise.

So, like, what does all of this look like?

Why am I writing this? Because I have a bunch of models about group houses, minors, and the combination of the two that I think other people might be interested in. I also want to have some publicly available thing that I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.

I'm reminded of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, an essay on the problems with handling "weird" data inputs that are normal for the people involved.