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 In A Modest Proposal For Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) (unpublished), we saw how ACE had moved away from quantitative evaluations, reducing their ability to find out which animal charities were best.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 In My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group (unpublished), we saw how an otherwise well-intentioned group of decent people mostly just kept chugging along producing a negligible impact on the world.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.
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Notes -
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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