Hmm, I personally think “discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot” applies a fair amount to my past experiences, and I think aiming too low was one of the biggest issues in my past, and I think EA culture is also messing up by discouraging aiming high, or something.
I think the main thing to avoid is something like “blind ambition”, where your plan involves multiple miracles and the details are all unclear. This seems also a fairly frequent phenomenon.
I think that you in particular might be quite non-representative of EAs in general, in terms of “success” in the EA context. If I imagine a distribution of “EA success,” you are probably very far to the right.
Accepting your self-report as a given, I have a bunch of questions.
I want to say that I’m not against ambition. From my perspective I’m encouraging more ambition, by focusing on things that might actually happen instead of daydreams.
Does the failure mode I’m describing (people spinning their wheels on fake ambition) make sense to you? Have you seen it?
I’m really surprised to hear you describe EA as discouraging aiming high. Everything I see encourages aiming high, and I see a bunch of side effects of aiming too high littered around me. Can you give some examples of what you’re worried about?
What do you think would have encouraged more of the right kind of ambition for you? Did it need to be “you can solve global warming?”, or would “could you aim 10x higher?” be enough?
Hmm, I personally think “discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot” applies a fair amount to my past experiences, and I think aiming too low was one of the biggest issues in my past, and I think EA culture is also messing up by discouraging aiming high, or something.
I think the main thing to avoid is something like “blind ambition”, where your plan involves multiple miracles and the details are all unclear. This seems also a fairly frequent phenomenon.
I think that you in particular might be quite non-representative of EAs in general, in terms of “success” in the EA context. If I imagine a distribution of “EA success,” you are probably very far to the right.
Accepting your self-report as a given, I have a bunch of questions.
I want to say that I’m not against ambition. From my perspective I’m encouraging more ambition, by focusing on things that might actually happen instead of daydreams.
Does the failure mode I’m describing (people spinning their wheels on fake ambition) make sense to you? Have you seen it?
I’m really surprised to hear you describe EA as discouraging aiming high. Everything I see encourages aiming high, and I see a bunch of side effects of aiming too high littered around me. Can you give some examples of what you’re worried about?
What do you think would have encouraged more of the right kind of ambition for you? Did it need to be “you can solve global warming?”, or would “could you aim 10x higher?” be enough?
Feeling a bit tired to type a more detailed response, but I think I mostly agree with what you say here.