Thanks for this post, I found it very useful.

While I agree with you that these things should go without saying, I think I’m not so surprised that they don’t actually go without saying? 
In particular, I often notice that most of these things don’t seem to go without saying even for myself? There is obviously a good way of doing things, but (I assume ultimately because of something like a low opinion of one’s own competence, warranted or not), noticing that we’re doing something else instead is hard, and carefully tracking one’s impact is also hard. It is our job to do things better, but noticing that might come with eg. anxiety, beyond the fact that doing things better is in itself hard? Etc.

I kinda wish I wasn’t writing this: anyone reading this was most likely already aware of the point I’m making, and I don’t particularly feel proud of going "yes, motivating ourselves to become better and improve the world is awesome, but have you considered that sometimes it’s mildly inconvenient?". Still: sometimes it is in fact difficult, and, in the examples that come most readily to my mind at least, the bulk of what makes it difficult is some kind of anxiety of not being competent enough, or something along these lines.

Hence the question: the content of this post, while obviously true, does not in fact always go without saying: how could we make it more likely that it goes without saying more often and for more people?

My decision process was much dumber: 1. Try to spend less time on LW, and move to close the page after having reflexively opened it, deliberately not opening this post. 2. See Daystar’s comment on the frontpage and go "wait, that’s pretty important for me too". 3. Give ten bucks, because I don’t have $1,000 lying around.

So, basically, I’m making a mostly useless comment but thanks for reminding me to donate :-)

I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:

• To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue  about "what they want to do with their lives" or similar super long-term goals.
• In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way.
• Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe?
• And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said "it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain", when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they can fail, but they think it’s likely they could easily recover from that failure anyway). It’s quite well described (imho) here.
• But I’m pretty sure I’m covering only a relatively narrow part of the space of all the things that could be said on that topic, so I hope other people write other replies with completely different takes on the problem :-)

Interesting. This specific form of ‘reward’ also works well for me (and I also hadn’t conceptualised it as such), but when people talk about rewarding yourself as an incentive for doing something, it’s usually stuff like ‘give yourself a slice of cake if you’ve had a productive workday’ or whatever, and in those cases, my brain is always going ‘wait! I can have the cake anyway, even though I didn’t do what I planned! It’s right here, I can just eat it!’. I’m not sure why it happens, or why watching videos when exercising works better, but I assume it’s what Seth meant?

Thanks! I knew of Alexander, but you reminded me that I’ve been procrastinating on tackling the 1,200+ pages of A Pattern Language for a few months, and I’ve now started reading it :-)

I’m being slightly off-topic here, but how does one "makes it architecturally difficult to have larger conversations"? More broadly, the topic of designing spaces where people can think better/do cooler stuff/etc. is fascinating, but I don’t know where to learn more than the very basics of it. Do you know good books, articles, etc. on these questions, by any chance?

Apparently, he co-founded the channel. But of course he might have had his voiced faked just for this video, as some suggested in the comments to it.

The very real possibility that it’s not in fact Stephen Fry’s voice is as frightening to me as to anyone else, but Stephen Fry doing AI Safety is still really nice to listen to (and at the very least I know he’s legitimately affiliated with that YT channel, which means that Stephen Fry is somewhat into AI safety, which is awesome)

"Have you met non-serious people who long to be serious? People like that seem very rare to me."
… Hmmm… kinda? Like, you’re probably right that it’s few people, and in specific circumstances, but I know some people who are doing something they don’t like, or who are doing something they like but struggling with motivation or whatever for other reasons, and certainly seem to wish they were more serious (or people who did in fact change careers or whatever and are now basically as serious as Mastroianni wants them to be, when they weren’t at all before). But those are basically people who were always inclined to be serious but were prevented from doing so by their circumstances, so you have a point, of course.

Yes, he’s definitely a polemicist, and not a researcher or an expert. By training, he’s a urologist with an MBA or two, and most of what he writes definitely sounds very oversimplified/simplistic.