In The American Empire has Alzheimer's, we saw how the US had repeatedly been rebuffing forecasting-style feedback loops that could have prevented their military and policy failures. In A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform, we saw how Open Philanthropy, a large foundation, spent and additional $100M in a cause they no longer thought was optimal. In A Modest Proposal For Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) (unpublished), we saw how ACE had moved away from quantitative evaluations, reducing their ability to find out which animal charities were best. In External Evaluation of the Effective Altruism Wiki, we saw someone spending his time less than maximally ambitiously. In My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group (unpublished), we saw how an otherwise well-intentioned group of decent people mostly just kept chugging along producing a negligible impact on the world. As for my own personal failures, I just come out of having spent the last couple of years making a bet on ambitious value estimation that flopped in comparison to what it could have been. I could go on.
Those and all other failures could have been avoided if only those involved had just been harder, better, faster, stronger. I like the word "formidable" as a shorthand here.
In this post, I offer some impressionistic, subpar, incomplete speculation about why my civilization, the people around me, and myself are just generally not as formidable as we could maximally be. Why are we not more awesome? Why are we not attaining the heights that might be within our reach?
These hypotheses are salient to me:
- Today's cultural templates and default pipelines don't create formidable humans.
- Other values, like niceness, welcomingness, humility, status, tranquility, stability, job security and comfort trade off against formidability.
- In particular, becoming formidable requires keeping close to the truth, but convenient lies and self-deceptions are too useful as tools to attain other goals.
- Being formidable at a group level might require exceptional leaders, competent organizational structures, or healthy community dynamics, which we don't have.
I'll present these possible root causes, and then suggest possible solutions for each. My preferred course of action would be to attack this bottleneck on all fronts.
Post continued here. I'm posting to The Motte since I really appreciated the high quality comments from here on previous posts.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
A couple thoughts: I refuse to type formidbiblaselkasdlk;jasdf, it is now FMBDS
Truth anticorrelates with FMBDS in the social sense; even if you are FMBDS if you never reach a position of liberty its like you never existed. See, Lyndon B Johnson in the telling lies sense and Napoleon/Mao/authoritarian of choice in the believing your own bullshit sense.
I think that a lack of safety net actually decrease FMBDS, which seems to corelate with risk. Might be why FMBDS historical people have been disproportionately aristocratic/completely dispossessed/mentally ill (EG Stalin). There could be lots of people with FMBDS qualities that never find out/use them because grandma needs health insurance or some shit. Like you said, trade offs where one side has infinite weight.
Finally: FMBDS might only exist in retrospect; it might be a pattern seeking hallucination where we assign values to qualities our monkey brains say make for successful individuals/groups, but only to the groups that succeed. Eg, suppose that Napoleon lost. Is he still FMBDS?
Basically, I think FMBDS is a valuable quality but also such a moving target you can't actually figure out if it there or not without doing a full autopsy.
Napoleon did lose. Twice :P Is he still FMBDS?
Yup.
But what if he loses on day one? What if Charles is born 10 years earlier gets ahold of the Austrian army at the same time as the levee?
Is he still FMBDS? I'd say no. So FMBDS must be relative, not absolute.
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Most people don't have clear, achievable goals that are few in number. They (we) have a vague blur of constantly shifting goals roughly along the lines of (do better at work | find love | get some sleep | wouldn't it be cool if I were prime minister | get people to like me). Being formidable requires talent, skill, opportunity, and a clear mid-term goal to work for.
On top of this, being formidable for long enough, in an impressive enough position for people to take note, requires huge amounts of luck over a long period. @RandomRanger cites Dominic Cummings - he was relevant for maybe 5 years before making the wrong call and being summarily destroyed. Napoleon spent most (?) of his life in prison. Hitler flowered and flamed in maybe 15 years; likewise Caesar. When you get near the top, it's easier to fall than rise and it doesn't seem to matter how formidable you are.
I mean, we don't have a small number of clearly achievable goals, but if you pick N major human drives, the question then becomes why aren't we better at attaining all the major human drives, and formidability would just be a shorthand for becoming better across all these dimensions. But I'd in fact think that excellency in various domains does correlate.
Sure, but we don't see that many people taking their shot at greatness come what may rather than wasting away in their cubicle jobs.
What I'm saying is that "pick N major drives" is already taking you almost into the real of fantasy. I would LOVE to be able to pick N major drives and try to excel at them, but right now Major Drive IX (to do well in my career by studying leetcode this evening) is losing out to Minor Drive XXC (to get a proper night's sleep for once) combined with Minor Drive XVIII (write clever things on the Motte).
Very few pick a set of things they want to excel at and then devote everything to that effort. It needs a strength of focus bordering on monomania (often resulting from poverty or a bad home life). If you want people to be formidable, I think your first priority should be in finding reliable ways to prioritise and focus on long-term goals.
Mmh, I see what you are saying. But on the other hand, there is such a thing as a Pareto frontier. Some points on that pareto frontier, such that you can't fulfill more needs without sacrificing previous gains, might be:
Like, if I look at my actions, I don't get the impression that I'm on any kind of Pareto frontier, where, idk, listening more to my in-the-moment curiosity trades off against the success of my romantic relationships, which trades off against professional success. It seems like I could just be... better on all fronts? Contradictorily, there is a sense in which I am "doing the best I can at every given moment", but it feels incomplete, and doesn't always ring true. Sorry for the rambling here.
For your example, making your same comment in the morning seems like it could plausibly be a better choice.
Yeah, maybe. My discount rates have increased a bunch after the fall of FTX, since their foundation was using some of the tools I was working on for the last few years. So now I'm a bit more hesitant about doing longer term stuff that relies on other people, and also, sadly, longer term stuff in general.
Oh, certainly! I don't at all mean to imply that no improvement is possible. I recently made a change in my circumstances that has been largely positive on most fronts, and equally I find that if you're in a stable position for a while you figure out ways to make the most of it.
I find that my limits mostly come from a lack of energy and focus: there's only so much I can force myself to do in a day. That's why I bring up the need to trade things off. There seem to be people in history (the really formidable people you speak of) who didn't seem to really be limited in the same way. I'm re-reading Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and he really does seem to have had nearly unlimited energy. I'm not sure if it came from his strenuous life or whether it produced it. I'm also not sure whether it relates to the massive amounts of coffee he supposedly drank. But looking for improvements in this area is the thing that I care about most. It's the equivalent of growing GDP rather than rationing budget allocations.
You mean mental tools? Or you were building software?
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Who are the most formidable people in history? Surely, Napoleon, Hitler, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Mao are at the top of the list. They came from humble origins and carved their names into history. Great men arrive (or are allowed to reach prominence) in times of uncertainty. The French Revolution, Weimar Germany, late Republican crisis (Sulla and Marius were ripping the state apart before Caesar had a chance to start his own civil war), general anarchy in tribal Mongolia, the Century of Humiliation in China...
I think when things are really stable, you get ossification and decay. You get low-variance, middling people running things: people who have connections, people who do a pretty poor job but nobody really needs excellent work. When there's a desperate need for high-performance, when there's instability and mediocre won't cut it, then power goes to the great men, people who get things done.
Maybe I'm just rehashing 'good times breed weak men, weak men make harsh times'. Even so, isn't there a clash of personality types? I think Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are the closest we have to the great men 'type' today, aiming for performance above all else. Elon Musk is widely hated and disliked by the usual suspects in government and acceptable society, Cummings got outmanoeuvred by the other politicians and media. If you think Cummings is a stretch for a great man, sure, I think he's an example of the ones that get shot down in times of relative peace and prosperity.
Cummings was never a politician. He was a political technologist, someone who could be hired and fired at will.
He could never be a politician in a democratic society. I mean, I'd probably vote for him, but most people absolutely hated him, and would likely have hated him even without the media campaign against him. Maybe if he looked like Henry Cavill he might have a shot. (not clear how good leadership instincts he has)
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I think military greatness is a red-herring here: I don't think that it's a realistic shot at greatness for readers here. Starting a religion, or a billion-dollar startup, or a social/political movement seems much easier.
Maybe so, but it's a useful handle nonetheless.
I'm not sure about them two. I prefer Peter Thiel as an example. He was:
and like, these aren't world-changing, but he's still got time, and he isn't constrained by fickle political winds.
Oh yeah Thiel would also count, I thought of him. Soros too, I think.
Bismark Analysis has a pretty great analysis of Soros here: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-legacy-of-george-soros-open-society, which might be of interest.
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Because there is a heap of inertia, drag, deadweight, friction and general "trying to shift a hippo with a straw" baked into the physical reality around us, be that the world itself or the systems, cultures and societies we have created.
When enthused new people come charging in with a Grand Plan To Do It Better, most of the time they are not starting from scratch with a greenfield site and a blank slate, they are trying to shovel out the entire Augean stables. With a toothbrush. All the proposals about a shiny new educational system, for instance - what happens to the entire edifice that is already in place and the hundreds of thousands of kids in the school system, when you come along to tear it all down and put your solution in its stead?
You can be as formidable as you like, but the dumb, massive, lazy black ox of the world chews on the cud and ignores you as you shove at its hindquarters. Even Alexander The Great left nothing lasting behind him except the memory of his victories, as his empire was carved up and the successors started squabbling and fighting with each other.
A. There is a heap of inertia B. Enthusiastic people with a grand plan are working in fields which already have inertia C. Therefore enthusiastic people which have a grand plan will be bogged down in that previously existing inertia.
I mean, sure. But then the answer would seem to not work inside fields which already have huge amounts of negative inertia: to try to explore new fields, or to in fact try to create a greenfield site. To give a small example, the Motte does happen to be its own effort, and thus seems less bogged down. Or, many open source projects were started pretty much from scratch.
Any thoughts on why people don't avoid fields with huge amounts of inertia? Otherwise the inertia hypothesis doesn't sound that explanatory to me.
Because those are the places where "Hmm, Something Must Be Done" is most visible. If you say you want to solve the problem of making shoes for grasshoppers, most people are likely to go "Uh, well, good luck with that" and not really get involved. But everyone has an opinion on Education or Politics or The Economy or Public Art. That's where you go if you want to make a name for yourself and improve the lot of humanity by making us faster, stronger, harder, better.
You could also choose nuclear energy, better vaccines & pandemic prevention, better urban planning. etc. Or even in education, things like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, the Arch Wiki, edx, Stack Overflow,... provide value and make humanity more formidable. Thinking about those examples, do you still get the sense of pessimism, almost defeatism in your previous comments?
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Humans spending their time maximally ambitiously is not something to be admired.
Respectfully disagree. Though it's hard to say whether we do disagree in substance. Maybe you think that trying to be maximally ambitious is always misguided, and I'd agree that being misguided + maximally ambitious is not something to be admired? idk.
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