I thought I had mostly internalized the heavy-tailed worldview from a life-guiding perspective, but reading Ben Kuhn’s searching for outliers made me realize I hadn’t. So here are some summarized reminders for posterity:
Key idea: lots of important things in life generated by multiplicative processes resulting in heavy-tailed distributions – jobs, employees / colleagues, ideas, romantic relationships, success in business / investing / philanthropy, how useful it is to try new activities
Decision relevance to living better, i.e. what Ben thinks I should do differently:
Getting lots of samples improves outcomes a lot, so draw as many samples as possible
Trust the process and push through the demotivation of super-high failure rates (instead of taking them as evidence that the process is bad)
But don’t just trust any process; it must have 2 parts: (1) a good way to tell if a candidate is an outlier (“maybe amazing” below) (2) a good way to draw samples
Optimize less, draw samples more (for a certain type of person)
Filter for “ruling in” candidates, not “ruling out” (e.g. in dating)
Cultivate an abundance mindset to help reject more candidates early on (to find 99.9th percentile not just 90th)
Think ahead about what outliers look like, to avoid accidentally rejecting 99.9th percentile candidates out of miscalibration, by asking others based on their experience
My reservations with Ben’s advice, despite thinking they’re mostly sound and idea-generating:
“Stick with the process through super-high failure rates instead of taking them as evidence that the process is bad” feels uncomfortably close to protecting a belief from falsification
Filtering for “maybe amazing”, not “probably good” makes me uncomfortable because I’m not risk-neutral (e.g. in RP’s CCM I’m probably closest to “difference-making risk-weighted expected utility = low to moderate risk aversion”, which for instance assesses RP’s default AI risk misalignment megaproject as resulting in, not averting, 300+ DALYs per $1k)
Unlike Ben, I’m a relatively young person in a middle-income country, and the abundance mindset feels privileged (i.e. not as much runway to try and fail)
So maybe a precursor / enabling activity for the “sample more” approach above is “more runway-building”: money, leisure time, free attention & health, proximity to opportunities(?)
I thought I had mostly internalized the heavy-tailed worldview from a life-guiding perspective, but reading Ben Kuhn’s searching for outliers made me realize I hadn’t. So here are some summarized reminders for posterity:
Key idea: lots of important things in life generated by multiplicative processes resulting in heavy-tailed distributions – jobs, employees / colleagues, ideas, romantic relationships, success in business / investing / philanthropy, how useful it is to try new activities
Decision relevance to living better, i.e. what Ben thinks I should do differently:
Getting lots of samples improves outcomes a lot, so draw as many samples as possible
Trust the process and push through the demotivation of super-high failure rates (instead of taking them as evidence that the process is bad)
But don’t just trust any process; it must have 2 parts: (1) a good way to tell if a candidate is an outlier (“maybe amazing” below) (2) a good way to draw samples
Optimize less, draw samples more (for a certain type of person)
Filter for “maybe amazing”, not “probably good”, as they have different traits
Filter for “ruling in” candidates, not “ruling out” (e.g. in dating)
Cultivate an abundance mindset to help reject more candidates early on (to find 99.9th percentile not just 90th)
Think ahead about what outliers look like, to avoid accidentally rejecting 99.9th percentile candidates out of miscalibration, by asking others based on their experience
My reservations with Ben’s advice, despite thinking they’re mostly sound and idea-generating:
“Stick with the process through super-high failure rates instead of taking them as evidence that the process is bad” feels uncomfortably close to protecting a belief from falsification
Filtering for “maybe amazing”, not “probably good” makes me uncomfortable because I’m not risk-neutral (e.g. in RP’s CCM I’m probably closest to “difference-making risk-weighted expected utility = low to moderate risk aversion”, which for instance assesses RP’s default AI risk misalignment megaproject as resulting in, not averting, 300+ DALYs per $1k)
Unlike Ben, I’m a relatively young person in a middle-income country, and the abundance mindset feels privileged (i.e. not as much runway to try and fail)
So maybe a precursor / enabling activity for the “sample more” approach above is “more runway-building”: money, leisure time, free attention & health, proximity to opportunities(?)