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freyley comments on Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
The author does not seem to understanding survivorship bias. He never approaches the question of whether the things he proposes are the reason for Musk's success actually work, or whether they happen to work for Musk in a context-dependent way. In other words, if you give this as advice to someone random, will they end up successful or an outcast. I'd guess the latter in most cases. This is in general the problem of evaluating the reasons behind success.
Also, unnecessary evolutionary psychology, done badly, even to the point of suggesting group selection. Ick.
The idea that using technical language (which isn't actually any more precise in meaning in the examples cited) in regular life is beneficial in being more scientific is also pretty suspect.
The whole thing reads like a fairly standard (but very disorganized) self-help tract trying to exhort people into being more agenty and strategic. Some of it maps directly onto LW self-help posts, even, like 'people are not automatically strategic' and existing techniques like COZE.
Since, for better or worse, most self-help material doesn't wind up helping or harming even when someone actually tries to use them, I don't think that this particular self-help tract will be any different - anyone trying to use the ideas and aspire to be a chef rather than a cook will wind up probably in the same place as they would before. People aren't going to either become billionaires or homeless just because they read something online; if writing could reliably have that sort of impact, we would live in a very different and much more interesting world than we do...
I agree with OP that most people do have sub-optimal levels of agentiness and planning and have really wacky evaluations of risk (consider anything to do with children, or terrorism), so if it did do anything, it would probably be helpful on net.
Aren't you underestimating how the form of this article makes it different from self-help tracts and LW?
It exploits the Musk cult to spread LW-ish ideas. It contains excitement and humor that makes it palatable for people who can't stomach the dry LW style. With WaitButWhy's considerable reach, it'll be seen by people who've never seen LW or self-help tracts.
Small nitpick: I think the reason self-help has little effect is that most people don't apply it, not that they apply it and nothing happens.
But why do they not apply it? Either way, the self-help material doesn't wind up helping or harming.
Perhaps it is because most people are not nearly as free as they experience themselves to be. They think that they can learn, that they can know, that they can act, but in reality they mostly struggle with anything larger than choosing from a restaurant menu. They struggle even with no-brainers like not living as a couch potato. Why do we even have a short code for "couch potato"?
To elaborate on MattG's "doing shit differently is hard" hypothesis: implementing most kinds of self-help advice requires permanently adopting new habits, and implementing habit change is hard. We know from habit formation studies that in order to establish a new habit, you need to associate the habit with consistent rewards and triggers, so that each time that you encounter the trigger you carry out the habit, and you should also receive a reward on a fair number of the occasions that you carry out the habit. Furthermore habits can easily fall apart if the triggers aren't robust and flexible enough.
On top of this you have Scott Alexander's "Life Hack Paradox", where those self-help habits that aren't hard become saturated, and simply become the cost of doing business (E.G Goal setting, Caffeine)
Preliminary hypothesis: Doing shit differently is hard.
"Hard" is just a dormitive principle here. If we observe many people attempting a thing and few succeeding, we call it hard because that is what the word means. It is not an explanation of why most fail, only an observation that they do.
Sort of - the other reasons beside it being hard would be that it's ineffective as Gwern supposed, or that it's unpleasant, or that it's low payoff, or that the current behavior is very pleasant or very high payoff.
All these could effect how hard the effort is, but they could also effect the decision without changing how hard it is to change.
More generally, I assume that LWers are already familiar with things like, willpower depletion, status quo bias, and habit formation that make staying the same easier than changing
I think a sizeable portion of people do things like daily affirmations. But even for applied self help there are often effects but the effect are neither that the person ends up as a billionaires or homeless.
I don't think it's as simple as "Successful or outcast" dichotomy.
In general, I'd see it as a tradeoff between the cook as "low risk/low reward" and the chef as "high risk/high reward." The chef has higher expected value, but the cook has less failure.
I think if you keep doing the chef thing, even in the face of failure, you'll probably eventually hit upon a success (provided you have the other ingredients he has, like talent and drive) - but you probably won't be like Musk, who won the lottery by having success after success.
Try thinking of it as a case study, not a comprehensive literature review. I didn't really take anything in there as claiming that if I install Musk's mental software then I will succeed at anything I try. The author explicitly mentions several times that Musk thought SpaceX was more likely to fail than succeed. Similarly, there's bits like this:
It makes a lot more sense if you read it as a case study. He's positing a bunch of hypotheses, some of which are better worded than others. If you steel-man the ones with obvious holes, most seem plausible. (For example, one of the ones that really annoyed me was the way he worded a claim that older children are less creative, which he blamed on schooling but made no mention of a control group.) But the thing was already pretty long, so I can excuse some of that. He's just hypothesizing a bunch of qualities that are necessary but not sufficient.