✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

johnswentworth's Shortform — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 634 words · saved by 1 readers

Comment by johnswentworth - Hypothesis: for smart people with a strong technical background, the main cognitive barrier to doing highly counterfactual technical work is that our brains' attention is mostly steered by our social circle. Our thoughts are constantly drawn to think about whatever the people around us talk about. And the things which are memetically fit are (almost by definition) rarely very counterfactual to pay attention to, precisely because lots of other people are also paying attention to them. Two natural solutions to this problem: * build a social circle which can maintain its own attention, as a group, without just reflecting the memetic currents of the world around it. * "go off into the woods", i.e. socially isolate oneself almost entirely for an extended period of time, so that there just isn't any social signal to be distracted by. These are both standard things which people point to as things-historically-correlated-with-highly-counterfactual-work. They're not mutually exclusive, but this model does suggest that they can substitute for each other - i.e. "going off into the woods" can substitute for a social circle with its own useful memetic environment, and vice versa.

x johnswentworth's Shortform — LessWrong johnswentworth's Shortform by johnswentworth 27th Feb 2020 AI Alignment Forum 1 min read 774 11 Ω 5 This is a special post for quick takes by johnswentworth . Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page . Rendering 0 / 774 comments, sorted by top scoring (show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 2:02 PM Moderation Log More from johnswentworth View more Curated and popular this week 774 Comments 774 Comment Permalink johnswentworth 1y 94 78 Hypothesis: for smart people wi

Explore this link on the map →

related reading