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ScroogeMcDuck comments on Hack Away at the Edges - Less Wrong
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It's damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I've watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley... including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn't think mundane work was trivial, we'd get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that "anybody could do".
As another example, I've had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do "anything" or "whatever helped the most". SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it's something "so mundane", that anybody could do it... therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I've personally asked over 100 people to help with it.
Have you thought about studying the persuasive and motivational arts in an attempt to increase this batting average? I'm always fascinated how watching videos by Internet marketer Eben Pagan makes me want to buy his stuff, forgetting the fact that I could probably get comparable knowledge from much cheaper library books. Sometimes I wish all of the advice I read came in an Eben Pagan format.
For what it's worth, I just submitted Less Wrong and its articles to 2 subreddits, 3 link directories, and Hacker News... and now I'm resting easy in the knowledge that I've saved trillions of future lives in expected value. (Only mentioning this in case anyone else is interested in saving trillions of lives, of course. Reddit is probably a good place to start, especially if you already have an account; my reddit submission rate is throttled severely.)
See what I tried to do there? ;)
I suspect the first step is to transition from blame-oriented language to opportunity-oriented language.