One of those abstracts where you feel like you're having a stroke

Also: Why are basically only Indonesians studying the effectiveness of the Pólya method

@niplav > "The more ambitious plan may have more chances of success […] provided it is not based on a mere pretension but on some vision of the things beyond those immediately present."

I call this "abstract leverage": given a specific problem, sometimes it's *easier* to try to find a more general solution which solves more than what you bargained for.

Spaced repetition is "memory leverage".

@niplav combine this w the fact that "the difficulty of solving a problem correlates only weakly wrt the utility gained by it,"* ("utility-invariance of ) and it explains part of the story of why i aim to be extremely ambitious.

*eg, the difficulty of inventing cheap cultured meat is invariant to the number of animals helped by it. etc.

@niplav another reason for extreme ambition is that it's easier to get 60 by tossing one 60-sided die compared to ten 6-sided dice. by internalizing more of the variables upon which world-saving depends (i.e., by ~only relying on myself, heroic responsibility, etc), i correlate the variables and flatten the tails of the convolved distribution. *even if* it reduces the utility of the median outcome, it increases my odds of sampling the tail.

@niplav furthermore, if world-saving is a ∃-game (we only need one/handfwl of ppl to succeed wildly, rather than most/all), the best community strat is for evybody to take risks.

@niplav also EMH. ~nobody has tried extreme ambition wrt altruism. and there are reasons ("costs of compromise") to think success is much more likely if you *try directly*, compared to if u just aim for merely-very-high utility. merely-very-high-peak-utility projects may not inform u v much abt the difficulty of extremely-high-peak-utility projects.

@rime

To be clear (contrary? to my previous reply) I don't really think the market for altruism is efficient yet, and will not be so for quite a while

Transfer from high to very high to extremely high utility projects—no idea

When I look back the backchainers didn't do very much cool stuff (?)

Weirdly many good things come from stumbling & sweat (Haber-Bosch process, electricity, reducing biomes…)

@niplav stumbling & sweat does hv the weight-advantage (many more things are stumbling & sweating to do innovation, compared to those who are backchaining ("inward-chaining" as opposed to "outward-chaining") toward v far-off goals).

much of my inclination for doing extreme ambition is derived fm experience/intuition, however; the theorys i mentioned above carry mby 25% of my confidence. many cases where thinking "evybody's clueless, so do it myself" seems to hv worked surprisingly well.