The Portrait Corollary
Entry question: What do you do when you need 50 people for solving a problem and you only have 1?
(Sneak preview: you change the assumption)
The Setting: Frustration
I was on vacation a couple of months ago in my home city. I used to go to a park regularly to meet a certain Agent and discuss various ideas. Over a period of a week, I explained to him certain important truths I had come across about the world - stuff that I believe changes a huge deal in both our lives, stuff that I plan to elaborate on in future essays.
I kept explaining, and he kept understanding, and I think we both understood what I was talking about. Till that point, I had talked about truths, facts about the world. It was purely descriptive. Nothing about what we needed to do next or anything.
So, naturally, that was my next destination.
“So… what now?”, I asked.
“So… what now?”, he asked back.
Well, in my opinion, it was pretty clear what now. It was obvious, I think. The actions we needed to take next followed logically from the facts that we had discussed and agreed upon.
Still… nothing. He still seemed not to be able to see the necessary consequences on his own. Maybe it wasn’t as obvious as I thought it was.
Maybe to him, it seemed like it was all just a bunch of facts about the world, interesting and counter-intuitive, but nothing different from trivia. Something like, “Hmmm… yes, that’s a pretty interesting line of thought. Hmmm… anyway… what’s for dinner?”.
Mind the Gap
I went back home each time with a sense that there was something missing. At different times during the day, I would rack my brain to think of some argument that would convince my friend and make him see the absolute necessary actions that these facts-about-the-world implied. To no avail. I finished my vacation and went back to my work site without ever having discussed any specific action plans.
On a personal note, I had planned to think about some topics on my vacation and get some clarity on them. It went well for the first couple of weeks but, by the end, I was kinda off the track. I had lost my way a bit.
It was only after a couple of weeks back at work that I finally got it. I had got an idea about some topic and noted it down on my phone. Then, it struck me that it was my first original idea in weeks. The tap had been shut for a while now.
Only then I realized - I had lost sight of the gap.
I kept thinking about how to reduce the gap between them and me. I needed to fix this right away.
But I lost sight of a gap that was 200x as big. Which one?
The gap between me and my potential.
For some reason, thinking about teaching people seemed to stall my personal growth.
I could either think about Growing Stronger. Or I could think about how to teach people what I knew so far.
For some reason, I wasn’t able to do both at the same time.
Teacher-mode is evil and sneaky
I should know better, right? I have written umpteen times about how I needed to not write for others. I did change my entire vision for this website after the Portrait post. But this was different.
I started teaching without even realizing I was teaching. I didn’t set out to try to convince him or anything. I thought what I told him was something everybody in the world should know. I was planning to just drop the facts and let circumstances take it from there. I had other things going on. I had some topics of my own that I wanted to understand better.
But the moment I started “explaining” the facts, I guess my mind felt it wasn’t worth spending so much effort on the explanation if it didn’t make an Impact on the listener. Subtly, my focus changed. In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s make sure the message really sinks in. And so it happened. I fell into teacher-mode. My attention was now so fully focussed on trying to convince Mr. Agent that I had none left for generating ideas on my own.
There is only one Top Idea in your Mind on any given day. You can either employ your mind in cracking some problems you want to solve or you can put it to work on convincing other people. Not both. As the Thalaivar put it, you can either Persuade or you can Discover. Not both.
On the margin
I’m much better off putting my energy into discovering new truths than in persuading people of things I already know, not least because I suck at the latter. I may not be a Master at discovering truths about the world (yet), but I am much much worse at convincing other people.
And I am convinced that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit out there in terms of ideas that will help me solve problems and improve the world. Convincing people has lower priority because even if they accept the ideas, there is near-zero probability of them taking any Action on it. Akrasia is the bottleneck, not ideas, and it makes sure that the Expected Impact of Convincing People is a big fat nothing.
Which means that if push comes to shove, as it has, the way ahead is to Discover, not Persuade. The Portrait essay makes it clear to me that when I focus on teaching others, even indirectly, like in writing an essay or explaining stuff, I completely stall my growth in the area of idea-generation and becoming-stronger.
The Portrait Corollary: Aim to do it all yourself
Whatever you’re planning, SPK, big or small, expect to do it all by yourself. Aim to go the distance alone. You will have to do all the work on your own. Plan on identifying the problems, collecting existing knowledge about them, clarifying them, getting a deep understanding of the fields, and solving them all by yourself.
Don’t hold out for a community of Rationalists (perhaps trained or inspired by you) who will Rock together. Ain’t happening.
Or, to be precise, it’s not a helpful belief. Why? Cos it makes you focus on the gap between you and your potential co-conspirators and mentees instead of focussing completely on becoming a Super Saiyan Master Rationalist.
I didn’t say it out loud, but somewhere deep down, I was expecting that somehow people would band together and take on the problems. The allure is obvious - the more people there are, the more work they can do in parallel. Instead of one guy sitting in front of a computer trying to think of ideas, my hope was that we would have whole bunches of people coming up with ideas, testing them out, getting feedback, and kicking ass in general.
I’m not so hopeful these days. It’s hard to convince people about the important issues, it’s hard for people to get themselves to work on problems that they know they should work on, and it’s hard for them to make any progress even if they take action because they don’t have the requisite skill. When you apply all these filters, the number of people left is a rounding error. Forget about making an army of Rationalists.
Every now and then, someone asks why the people who call themselves “rationalists” don’t always seem to do all that much better in life, and from my own history the answer seems straightforward: It takes a tremendous amount of rationality before you stop making stupid damn mistakes.
– Make an Extraordinary Effort, Eliezer Yudkowsky
I’m still in the “making stupid damn mistakes” stage. Yes, I plan to give it everything I’ve got, but there is no guarantee that I will make it past the brutal filters.
One thing is clear, though. For the foreseeable future, at least, I plan to work it all out on my own. If I am joined by other interested parties, cool. We need all the help we can get. But I’m not gonna waste any effort on trying to convince or teach others anything.
Help may come, but I am not holding my breath.
Channel into Discovery
F*ck explaining ideas for some abstract general reader to understand. I demand that each sentence in each paragraph in each essay on this website helps me become stronger. It has got no business being here otherwise.
Ditto for trying to convince people about some ideas or making them see the actions that need to be taken. No more getting exasperated because people either failed to see the point or refused to accept the idea or weaseled out of taking any action. The only person I need to get mad at about not taking action is you-know-who (me, not Voldy).
The same goes for trying to become better at persuading others - learning to write in a more compelling manner, being more poetic or whatever, and figuring out the other techniques of rhetoric that people have used since antiquity to spread ideas. F*ck all that shit. I suck at convincing people about even the most truthful of ideas. It’s gonna stay that way, for now.
Persuade xor Discover, remember. One or the other, never both (with current human knowledge).
This means that I will probably not start topics from their fundamentals, though it may still be a good idea on occasion. I won’t even try to make posts be in some logical or understandable order. If X is a problem I’m currently trying to solve, I’ll write about it.
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
– Thalaivar Book SICP, Preface to the First Edition
Essays must be written for SPK to Become Stronger, and only incidentally for others to read.
What DIY means: Full Responsibility
Most important of all, forget about someone else coming along and figuring out solutions to problems that you care about. It’s not gonna happen. You’re gonna have to take full responsibility for it yourself.
You want these problems solved. Others may want these problems solved too, but even if they didn’t, it would still be up to you to make sure these problems were knocked out. It’s about growing up. It’s about knowing that the buck stops here. There is no parent figure, no God to whom you can pass on the responsibility.
You weren’t working on any of this stuff for the past two decades. See what happened. Pretty much nothing. Nobody else solved them or made great progress. You cannot sit back and hope for someone else to come in and save the day. There is no one coming. Get off your ass and take it on yourself.
Change the Assumption
F*ck! This means that me trying to “convince” others is a form of procrastination! I’m trying to find ways to shove off responsibility on others. And when they resist taking action or whatever, I use that as an excuse to not do anything myself.
I convince myself that the only way to crack these problems is by amassing an army of Rationalists who will lay siege on the problem together. So, when I’m not able to persuade others to join me, I just sit and whine because I believe the problem is just not doable without an army. “Boohoo! Nobody is coming along with me. I can never solve these problems. I’d better just sit and bitch about it cos, you know, it’s impossible for me to do it by myself.”
That is the main difference I’m talking about here!
Believe that you can solve these problems all by yourself. You have no other choice. It’s either this or just sitting and lamenting the deplorable state of human rationality. In one case, something good happens. In the other, nothing good happens. No Impact, No Right to Bitch, bitch!
It’s not blind faith. Ask (of your mind) and you shall receive. Work hard and you will become Stronger. These problems are not, in my opinion, insurmountable. It is the pathetic state of our Art of Rationality that makes lowly problems seem like formidable foes.
Take responsibility and plan to face the problems all by yourself. Believe that you can kick their ass.
“Because the only thing anyone needs to be special is to believe that you can be.”
– Ghost Vitrivius, The Lego Movie.
PS: Ideas
Before
- The Portrait Corollary: Do it all by yourself
After
Even innocently explaining to others will shift you into teacher-mode
The Persuade vs Discover comparative benefit equation
DIY => Full Responsibility - this is the crux. Not depending on anyone else.
Unhelpful and false belief: You need a lot of “rational” people together to solve these problems
Most important point: “Boohoo! Others are not getting convinced!” - form of Procrastination. Excuse for not working at full capacity.
I didn’t have any of these ideas in mind when I started. I thought it was a simple and straightforward Corollary. Essay-writing rocks! F*ck, it’s good to be back!
Note: This essay took me 3.5 hours to write, not the whole day. Just fyi.
PS: Letter to an Agent
Thanks for all the inspiration and encouragement you have provided me all this time. The mere thought of you reading my essays gives me that extra wallop to keep writing.
In light of the above points, though, I think you need have no fear of me pestering you to re-join me on The Great 300-Word Experiment. I won’t be pressing you on this point.
(Unless… you do want me to press you so that you will do it, in which case, I’m now making a big mistake by not pressing you. But then again, if you are gonna give up the huge stakes just because some idiot (me) did not push you hard enough, then maybe it really wasn’t that important to you in the first place. Peace :)
XOXO
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