Wisdom

What went wrong here? It’s hard to know exactly what led any given person to endorse any given argument. But when we zoom out, it becomes clear that many people in this space really want to pull some lever that feels important, and privilege arguments which justify that. That might come from a sense that they need to have an impact on the world; or fear about failing to fulfil their potential; or the more mundane explanation that big levers tend to be associated with money and prestige and proximity to power. Certainly the latter was a large part of why I joined OpenAI originally; I expect that most people who joined earlier were less prestige-oriented than me, but still made that decision using reasoning that was warped by similar emotional drives (and later further warped by the social dynamics of actually working there).

It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time.

The good is that at which we aim, to be sure, and yet the good that we seek can only ever be asymptotically approached by avoiding the evil, which is always nearer and clearer.

Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more.

Just as “chance favors the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur) so the muses of science and creativity favor those who have done their homework. Based on a survey of recent research in creativity, we could describe the four key stages of discovery as follows:

1. Immersion – a long depth engagement with a subject
2. Acquisition – of a wealth of data and experience relevant to the subject
3. Inspiration – the Eureka moment
4. Evaluation – testing the discovery through experiment and dissemination [2]

You can’t force stage three. To get to it, you may have to let go – take a walk, take a swim, take a nap, take a break.

A lot of the blame should fall on misguided narratives (common across academia) about what makes science work, which have been entrenched by the best-funded scientific institutions. A core scientific norm is that disputes should be resolved with reference to concrete empirical tests or rigorous proofs, judged by the scrutiny of one’s scientific peers. But that’s very different from the idea that ideas should be developed via paper-sized units of work which are each individually defended and justified. Historically speaking, the latter simply isn’t how the best science happened—Newton and Smith and Darwin developed their ideas via writing books and letters rather than peer-reviewed papers (and even Einstein didn’t encounter peer review until decades after his main breakthroughs). But the requirement to “publish or perish” is now so entrenched across academia that it produces strong streetlight effects.

[…] In this 1995 commentary on NIPS (now NeurIPS), a statistician frustrated by how “everyone wants to be a theorist” writes that “mathematical theory is not critical to the development of machine learning. But scientific inquiry is.” He characterizes scientific inquiry as “sensible and intelligent efforts to understand what is going on”, and gives overparameterization of neural networks as a central example of a good target for scientific inquiry. Yet only after the rise of deep learning did phenomena like grokking, deep double descent, and memorization of random labels render this omission too blatant to ignore (though I’m uncertain about how much real progress subsequent theoretical work has made).

If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues.

Not everyone needs to act like a monk, but men need a mission, a purpose to pursue, a sense that they matter. They need to have something for which they would sacrifice their comfort or in some cases even their lives if necessary. Young men need to know, as Jordan Peterson once wrote, that they have “some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.”

You should live the kind of life where if you were given a terminal cancer diagnosis, you’d feel like you’d achieved something of note. That there was some important respect in which the world was better because of you. Don’t merely aimlessly float by—achieve something meaningful. And love, through your actions, all those you love in your heart, unfailingly, till the end.

If we do not enter upon innovation with our eyes wide open to how our tools and machines will reshape us, we will become their slaves, not their masters.

If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. The latter assumes that we have acquired our faith through an act of reason instead of a change in our relation to facts that are the same for all of us.

Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could.

The greatest danger of this nonsense may not even be that it sends policy astray, but that it misleads ambitious people. Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it’s really done?

Kekulé had become practiced in receiving and developing helpful images in this way. When he described the roots of his scientific creativity in the Benzolfest in his honor in 1890, Kekulé told his audience, “Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, then perhaps we shall find the truth.” He added the salutary caution, “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by the waking understanding.”

The images that came to Kekulé would have been meaningless, in terms of chemistry, to someone who did not have a scientific mind that had long been working on the problems whose solutions they revealed. The imagery might have sent an artist off to paint, or sent someone with an interest in myth off to study the symbol of the Ouroboros in the ancient world and in alchemy.

When Kekulé urged his audience to “dream”, he was surely not talking exclusively, or primarily, about what happens in sleep. He was talking about developing the ability to enter a state of relaxed attention in which ideas take form and interact as images.

The great wisdom of his career, as Glimm likes to tell it, is depth first, then breadth. Do not waste time on a million directions at once—do one thing well, and then master another. Over time, you can have deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects. He is unusual, even among elite mathematicians, in that his research actually spans multiple academic disciplines.

One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

Berry always saw in humanity’s relationship with its land, and with the wider creation, a litmus test of what kind of people we were, or were becoming. “I have made myself its follower and its apprentice,” he wrote of his own farm in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” If we wanted to begin living better lives, he wrote in 2011, we should also apprentice ourselves to something local and particular, in whatever form we found it. “We must not work or think on a heroic scale,” he insisted, because heroes “too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see.” Instead, “we must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix.” A better world would not come through more grand plans, tech fixes, or centralized, ideological impositions. It would not come through “wage slavery or by enslaving nature.” It would come from the place it had always come from: “locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work.”

The devil owns the world anyway. Our job is to make it through the best we can.

The point of all this list-making isn’t to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they’re really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they’re not the most important things.

Indeed this pattern is so common that you can use it as a recipe: if you’re excited about some kind of work that’s not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that’s ok to do, but one to seek out.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

Which leads into another good question to ask yourself straight out: Did I spend five minutes with my eyes closed, brainstorming wild and creative options, trying to think of a better alternative? It has to be five minutes by the clock, because otherwise you blink—close your eyes and open them again—and say, “Why, yes, I searched for alternatives, but there weren’t any.” Blinking makes a good black hole down which to dump your duties. An actual, physical clock is recommended.

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.”

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance. Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a hard discipline because focusing on one thing slights another.

I feel like that was in part, I got much better at the skill of noticing things and thinking harder about predicting things. Also, there is just a thing where after a while every idea feeds on itself and builds on itself, you like to pick up a whole collection of useful ideas which you can apply to everything. I love… Gian-Carlo Rota has a good quote for how he does research where he said like, “Everyone has two mental tools that they apply to every problem, and a great mathematician will have 3.”

Before the settlement could be finalized, however, the CEO of Robot Central asked his AI system to explore all possible actions he could take and tell him their consequences. He adhered to the 1990s principle: Never ask an AI system what to do. Ask it to tell you the consequences of the different things you might do.

What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you’re interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.

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One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You’ll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you’ll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you’re genuinely interested in, you’ll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.

The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this “staying upwind.” If you’re unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.

There’s one case, though, where it’s easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one.

There’s a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to “follow your passion,” and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who’s famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you that you have to work on what you’re most interested in. And this is in fact true.

That doesn’t mean it’s the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can’t manufacture that.

The more you create, the more powerful you become.

The more you consume, the more powerful others become.

For every activity you naturally want to do, try to figure out a way to apply it to your direction. Your direction is sort of like a theme - if your direction is X and your interest is Y, then go do X-flavored Y-things.

When in Rome, leave.

Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”

‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’

You will have to grow accustomed to it. The world will indulge you just so long, Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you.

In both [descriptions of Einstein and Aquinas], one gets a vivid sense of extraordinary concentration on problems to the exclusion of most daily routine.

[Resolve is] the action of making a moral decision prior to the circumstances in which it is applied.

There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

Sometimes I think it is not wise to grow too old,.. […] But I am not aware that we are given a choice in this matter.

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Life he saw as a ceaseless and courageous contest.

Learning can be seen as a process of acquiring smarter and richer mnemonic devices to represent information, encoding similar information, into patterns, organization principles, and rules which represent even material we have never before encountered, but which is like what we do know, and thus can be recognized or remembered.

Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.

If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures, and add to your quota.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor… If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.