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 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.