Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I’m sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.
Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.
try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.
fake it, probably without knowing they’re doing so
learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you’d never started to the one where they had to rescue you.
discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.
The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.
My preferred version is ambition snowball or “get ambitious slowly”. Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.
I claim EA’s emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago
What size of challenge is the right size? I’ve thought about this a lot and don’t have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:
stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can’t track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project.
if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake.
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?
I’m a bit confused about this because “getting ambitious slowly” seems like one of those things where you might not be able to successfully fool yourself: once you can conceive that your true goal is to cure cancer, you are already “ambitious”; unless you’re really good at fooling yourself, you will immediately view smaller goals as instrumental to the big one. It doesn’t work to say I’m going to get ambitious slowly.
What does work is focusing on achievable goals though! Like, I can say I want to cure cancer but then decide to focus on understanding metabolic pathways of the cell, or whatever. I think if you are saying that you need to focus on smaller stuff, then I am 100% in agreement.
Does what I said here and here answer this? the goal isn’t “put the breaks on internally motivated ambition”, it’s “if you want to get unambitious people to do bigger projects, you will achieve your goal faster if you start them with a snowball rather than try to skip them straight to Very Big Plans”.
I separately think we should be clearer on the distinction between goals (things you are actively working on, have a plan with concrete next steps and feedback loops, and could learn from failure) and dreams (things you vaguely aspire and maybe are working in the vicinity of, but no concrete plans). Dreams are good, but the proper handling of them is pretty different from that of goals.
I also liked this quote from Obama on a similar theme. The advice is pretty common for very good reasons but hearing it from former POTUS had more emotional strength on me: ”how do we sustain our own sense of hope, drive, vision, and motivation? And how do we dream big? For me, at least, it was not a straight line. It wasn’t a steady progression. It was an evolution that took place over time as I tried to align what I believed most deeply with what I saw around me and with my own actions.
(...)
The first stage is just figuring out what you really believe. What’s really important to you, not what you pretend is important to you. And what are you willing to risk or sacrifice for it? The next phase is then you test that against the world, and the world kicks you in the teeth. It says, “You may think that this is important, but we’ve got other ideas. And who are you? You can’t change anything.”
Then you go through a phase of trying to develop skills, courage, and resilience. You try to fit your actions to the scale of whatever influence you have. I came to Chicago and I’m working on the South Side, trying to get a park cleaned up or trying to get a school improved. Sometimes I’m succeeding, a lot of times I’m failing. But over time, you start getting a little bit of confidence with some small victories. That then gives you the power to analyze and say, “Here’s what worked, here’s what didn’t. Here’s what I need more of in order to achieve the vision or the goals that I have.” Now, let me try to take it to the next level, which means then some more failure and some more frustration because you’re trying to expand the orbit of your impact.
I think it’s that iterative process. It’s not that you come up with a grand theory of “here’s how I’m going to change the world” and then suddenly it all just goes according to clockwork. At least not for me. For me, it was much more about trying to be the person I wanted to believe I was. And at each phase, challenging myself and testing myself against the world to see if, in fact, I could have an impact and make a difference. Over time, you’ll surprise yourself, and it turns out that you can.”
The problem with this advice is that many people in EA don’t think we have enough time to slowly build up. If you think AI might take control of the future within the next 15 years, you don’t have much time to build skills in the first half of your career and exercise power after you have 30 years of experience. There is an extreme sense of urgency, and I am not sure what’s the right response.
“we don’t have time” is only an argument for big gambles if they work. If ambition snowballs work better, then a lack of time is all the more reason not to waste time with vanity projects whose failures won’t even be educational.
I could steel man this as something of a lottery, where n% of people with way-too-big goals succeed and those successes are more valuable than the combined cost of the failures. I don’t think we’re in that world, because I think goals in the category I describe aren’t actually goals, they’re dreams, and by and large can’t succeed.
You could argue that’s defining myself into correctness and some big goals are genuinely goals even if they pattern match my criteria like “failure is uninformative” and “contemplating a smaller project is scary or their mind glances off the option (as opposed to being rejected for being too small)”. I think that’s very unlikely to be true for my exact critieria, but agree that in general overly broad definitions of fake ambition could do a lot of damage. I think creating a better definition people can use to evaluate their own goals/dreams is useful for that exact reason.
I also think that even if there are a few winning tickets in that lottery- people pushed into way-too-big projects that succeed- there aren’t enough of them to make a complete problem-solving ecosystem. The winning tickets still need staff officers to do the work they don’t have time for, or require skills inimical to swinging for the fences.
I should note that my target audience here is primarily “people attempting to engender ambition in others”, followed by “the people who are subject to those attempts”. I think engendering fake ambition is actively harmful, and the counterfactual isn’t “30 years in a suit”, it’s engendering ambition snowballs that lead to more real projects. I don’t think discouraging people who are naturally driven to do much-too-big projects is helpful.
I’d also speculate that if you tell a natural fence-swinger to start an ambition snowball, they end up at mind-bogglingly ambitious quickly, not necessarily slower than if you’d pushed them directly to dream big. Advice like “Do something that’s scary but at least 80% tractable” scales pretty well across natural ambition levels.
I think that people should break down their goals, no matter how easy they seem, into easier and smaller steps, especially if they feel lazy. Laziness appears when we feel like we need to do tasks that seem unecessary for us, even when we know that they’re necessary. One reason why they appear unecessary is their difficulty of achievement. Why exercise for 30 minutes per day if things are “fine” without that? As such, one way to deal with that is by taking whatever goal you have and breaking it down into a lot of easy steps. As an example, imagine that you want to write the theoretical part of your thesis. So, you could start by writing what is the topic, what questions you might want to research, what key uncertainties you have about those questions, then you search for papers in order to clarify those uncertainties, and so on, immediate step by step, until you finish your thesis. If a step seems difficult, break it down even more. That’s why I think that breaking down your goals into smaller and easier steps might help when you feel lazy.
GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY
Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I’m sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up.
Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options.
try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure.
fake it, probably without knowing they’re doing so
learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you’d never started to the one where they had to rescue you.
discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot.
The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.
My preferred version is ambition snowball or “get ambitious slowly”. Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.
I claim EA’s emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago
What size of challenge is the right size? I’ve thought about this a lot and don’t have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:
stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can’t track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project.
if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake.
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.
This post is very popular on Twitter https://x.com/eaheadlines/status/1690624321117388800?s=46&t=7jI2LUFFCdoHtZr1AtWyCA
I’m a bit confused about this because “getting ambitious slowly” seems like one of those things where you might not be able to successfully fool yourself: once you can conceive that your true goal is to cure cancer, you are already “ambitious”; unless you’re really good at fooling yourself, you will immediately view smaller goals as instrumental to the big one. It doesn’t work to say I’m going to get ambitious slowly.
What does work is focusing on achievable goals though! Like, I can say I want to cure cancer but then decide to focus on understanding metabolic pathways of the cell, or whatever. I think if you are saying that you need to focus on smaller stuff, then I am 100% in agreement.
Does what I said here and here answer this? the goal isn’t “put the breaks on internally motivated ambition”, it’s “if you want to get unambitious people to do bigger projects, you will achieve your goal faster if you start them with a snowball rather than try to skip them straight to Very Big Plans”.
I separately think we should be clearer on the distinction between goals (things you are actively working on, have a plan with concrete next steps and feedback loops, and could learn from failure) and dreams (things you vaguely aspire and maybe are working in the vicinity of, but no concrete plans). Dreams are good, but the proper handling of them is pretty different from that of goals.
I also liked this quote from Obama on a similar theme. The advice is pretty common for very good reasons but hearing it from former POTUS had more emotional strength on me:
”how do we sustain our own sense of hope, drive, vision, and motivation? And how do we dream big? For me, at least, it was not a straight line. It wasn’t a steady progression. It was an evolution that took place over time as I tried to align what I believed most deeply with what I saw around me and with my own actions.
(...)
The first stage is just figuring out what you really believe. What’s really important to you, not what you pretend is important to you. And what are you willing to risk or sacrifice for it? The next phase is then you test that against the world, and the world kicks you in the teeth. It says, “You may think that this is important, but we’ve got other ideas. And who are you? You can’t change anything.”
Then you go through a phase of trying to develop skills, courage, and resilience. You try to fit your actions to the scale of whatever influence you have. I came to Chicago and I’m working on the South Side, trying to get a park cleaned up or trying to get a school improved. Sometimes I’m succeeding, a lot of times I’m failing. But over time, you start getting a little bit of confidence with some small victories. That then gives you the power to analyze and say, “Here’s what worked, here’s what didn’t. Here’s what I need more of in order to achieve the vision or the goals that I have.” Now, let me try to take it to the next level, which means then some more failure and some more frustration because you’re trying to expand the orbit of your impact.
I think it’s that iterative process. It’s not that you come up with a grand theory of “here’s how I’m going to change the world” and then suddenly it all just goes according to clockwork. At least not for me. For me, it was much more about trying to be the person I wanted to believe I was. And at each phase, challenging myself and testing myself against the world to see if, in fact, I could have an impact and make a difference. Over time, you’ll surprise yourself, and it turns out that you can.”
The problem with this advice is that many people in EA don’t think we have enough time to slowly build up. If you think AI might take control of the future within the next 15 years, you don’t have much time to build skills in the first half of your career and exercise power after you have 30 years of experience. There is an extreme sense of urgency, and I am not sure what’s the right response.
“we don’t have time” is only an argument for big gambles if they work. If ambition snowballs work better, then a lack of time is all the more reason not to waste time with vanity projects whose failures won’t even be educational.
I could steel man this as something of a lottery, where n% of people with way-too-big goals succeed and those successes are more valuable than the combined cost of the failures. I don’t think we’re in that world, because I think goals in the category I describe aren’t actually goals, they’re dreams, and by and large can’t succeed.
You could argue that’s defining myself into correctness and some big goals are genuinely goals even if they pattern match my criteria like “failure is uninformative” and “contemplating a smaller project is scary or their mind glances off the option (as opposed to being rejected for being too small)”. I think that’s very unlikely to be true for my exact critieria, but agree that in general overly broad definitions of fake ambition could do a lot of damage. I think creating a better definition people can use to evaluate their own goals/dreams is useful for that exact reason.
I also think that even if there are a few winning tickets in that lottery- people pushed into way-too-big projects that succeed- there aren’t enough of them to make a complete problem-solving ecosystem. The winning tickets still need staff officers to do the work they don’t have time for, or require skills inimical to swinging for the fences.
I should note that my target audience here is primarily “people attempting to engender ambition in others”, followed by “the people who are subject to those attempts”. I think engendering fake ambition is actively harmful, and the counterfactual isn’t “30 years in a suit”, it’s engendering ambition snowballs that lead to more real projects. I don’t think discouraging people who are naturally driven to do much-too-big projects is helpful.
I’d also speculate that if you tell a natural fence-swinger to start an ambition snowball, they end up at mind-bogglingly ambitious quickly, not necessarily slower than if you’d pushed them directly to dream big. Advice like “Do something that’s scary but at least 80% tractable” scales pretty well across natural ambition levels.
This is fantastic, and mirrors the method that has helped things work well in my own life.
Agreed.
I think that people should break down their goals, no matter how easy they seem, into easier and smaller steps, especially if they feel lazy. Laziness appears when we feel like we need to do tasks that seem unecessary for us, even when we know that they’re necessary. One reason why they appear unecessary is their difficulty of achievement. Why exercise for 30 minutes per day if things are “fine” without that? As such, one way to deal with that is by taking whatever goal you have and breaking it down into a lot of easy steps. As an example, imagine that you want to write the theoretical part of your thesis. So, you could start by writing what is the topic, what questions you might want to research, what key uncertainties you have about those questions, then you search for papers in order to clarify those uncertainties, and so on, immediate step by step, until you finish your thesis. If a step seems difficult, break it down even more. That’s why I think that breaking down your goals into smaller and easier steps might help when you feel lazy.
Anyways, thanks for your quick take!