Not sure I quite parsed, but things that makes me think of:

• first, if you're bottlenecked on health (physical or mental), it may be that finding medication that helps is more important than your mindset.
• try success spiralling – start doing small things, build up both a habit/muscle of doing things, and momentum in doing things, escalate to bigger things
• if getting started is hard, maybe find a friend or pay a colleague to just sit with you and constantly be like "are you doing stuff?" and spray you with a water bottle if you look like you're overthinking stuff, until you build
• try doing doing doing just fucking do it man and when you're brain is like "idk that seems like a whole lotta doing what if we're doing the wrong thing?" be like "it's okay Thinky Brain this is an experiment we will learn from later so we evetually can calibrate on Optimal Think-to-Do Ratio"

when you attempt to switch from thinking to doing, what happens instead?

Sort of inspired by Erik Jenner's post:

If you've been vaguely following me and thought "man, I wish Ray hurried up and finished making the update that <X>", what are some values of X?

Great writeup.

1. Alice's team develops a major product without first checking to see if it's something people actually want -- after a year and a half of development, the product works great, but it turns out there isn't much of any demand. (I would consider this an observation failure -- failure to observe critical information leads to lots of wasted time.)

FYI I'd classify this more as a decision failure. They really would have had to take different actions in order to get this data, so this was more at the point when they were like "do I start building this product, or do I find some random representative users and see what they think of the idea?."

Also, since decision can flow pretty directly from orientation, you may find these two similar enough that you want to group them as one; I'm undecided on whether to make that change to this technique "more formally" and probably need to test it with more participants to see!

I actually normally combine/conflate Observe and Orient.

I think the actual takeaway here is: any two adjacent steps can kind of blend into each other. 

You might be in a microloop where you're observing and orienting (and then maybe looking for more observations and then orienting on the new ones). 

Then, when you're eventually like "okay I have enough observations", you may be in a loop where you're evaluating decisions, and then looking at your confused model and trying to wrangle the information into a form that's useful for decisionmaking, then look at your decision options again, be dissatisfied with your current ability to make-sense-of-things, and do more orienting.

Then eventually you're in a state where you know how to think about the situation, and you pretty much know what the options are, but as you start thinking about "Acting", your brain starts to see the consequences of each decision in near mode, which changes your guesses about which actions are best.

Then, as you start acting in earnest, each action comes with some immediate observations.

But, you can't really move from "Observe" to "Decide" without having gone through at least a little bit of an orient step on how to classify your observations.

I did a session yesterday with @moonlight, which went pretty well. I ended up consolidating some notes that seemed good to share with new assistants, and then he wrote the introduction he'd personally have preferred. 

I generally work out of google docs that serve as shared-external-working-memory, with multiple tabs.

Moonlight's Intro

[Written by the first thinking assistant working with Ray, writing here what I’d have liked to read first]

Important things:

• Ray is currently sick, so put some effort into speaking more softly and slowly.
• There is no interview or anything similar, you’ll begin assisting him straight away.
• By default, just watch him work (coding/planning/writing/operations), and occasionally give signs you’re still attentive, without interrupting.
• Write moment to moment observations which feel useful to you, as well as general thoughts, down in the Assistant Notes tab. This helps you feel more proactively involved and makes you focused on noticing patterns and ways in which you could be more useful as an assistant.
• The Journal tab is for his plans and thoughts about what to generally do. Read it as an overview.
• This Context tab is for generally useful information about what you should do and about relevant strategies and knowledge Ray has in mind. Reading this helps you get a more comprehensive view on what his ideal workflow looks like, and what your ideal contributions look like.

For the structure of this document:

• Collapse sections when reading. It helps traverse the document.
• This part has my thoughts for onboarding. Under it, you can find Ray’s onboarding section. Read these two first.
• The “Ray Facts” section has important information about logistics and operations. Currently it has only his work location. [edited out in this comment]
• In “Ray’s Metacognitive Engine” and below, you can find the strategies and knowledge I’ve mentioned above. You can read these after, they’re not mandatory at the very start.

Ray’s First Draft Intro Materials

Strategic Overview

Goal: End the acute risk period, and ensure a flourishing human future.

I’ve recently finished a bunch of grieving necessary to say “all right I’m ready to just level up into an Elon-Musk-but-with-empathy-and-cyborg-tools type”, as well as the minimum necessary pieces of a cognitive engine that (I think) is capable of doing so).

I want to be growing in capacity at an exponential rate, both in terms of my personal resources, and the resources available to the x-risk ecosystem that are accomplishing things I think need accomplishing.

This means having a number of resources that are compounding, that are synergistic, which include:

• Money (either mine, or ability to spend Lightcone’s)
• Skills
  • Meta personal skills, like ability to learn, and understand things, or be strategic
  • Meta interpersonal skills, such as the ability to outsource labor or make use of assistants,
  • Object level skills like programming, UI design, Event running
  • Ability to work with employees who can take on tasks I want done
• Capital
  • Relationships with people I work well with
  • Tools I can re-use

Things I actually do most days:

• Coding on LessWrong
• Coding on random other projects
• Planning my Cybercognition Agenda, which includes workshops, cybernetic tools, and upskilling people around me.
• UI design, trying to figure out important complex things I want people to interact with in a way that feels simple to them. 
• Thinking strategically about what needs to be done next

Instructions for Thinking Assistants

Things I would like you to do:

• By default, be quiet and attentive and just help me focus by being a real human who’s staring at me
• Develop skills for tackling sort of arbitrary ops or research or coding tasks, such that I can outsource small things to you.
• Advice
  • This is tricky because I have a good enough model of myself that a lot of advice isn’t that helpful. It’s still useful to have my blindspots pointed out. But, if I interrupt you (either with words or with a hand gesture) that probably means I want to move on to a different thread. (Ideally, you feel comfortable bringing up ideas, with no hard feelings if it doesn’t work out) 

I would like to end up with a series of if-then habits you can help me execute. I will mostly write these myself, but as you get to know me well enough to say useful things, you can make suggested-edits

From “Hire or become a Thinking Assistant”

• By default, be quietly but visibly attentive.
• Every now and then (~5-10 minutes, or when I look actively distracted), briefly check in (where if I'm in-the-zone, this might just be a brief "Are you focused on what you mean to be?" from them, and a nod or "yeah" from me).
• When I need to think something through, they rubber duck (i.e. listen as I talk out loud about it, and ask clarifying questions)
• Build a model of my thought process (partly by me explaining it to them, partly by observing, partly by asking questions)
• Ideally, notice when my thought process seems confused/disoriented/inefficient.
• Ideally, have a large repertoire of cognitive tools they can suggest if I seem to be missing them.
• Intelligent enough that they can pretty easily understand the gist of what I'm working on.
• Ability to pick things up from context so I don't need to explain things in too much detail.
• Ideally, when my bottlenecks are emotional, also be at least fairly emotionally attuned (i.e. project a vibe that helps me worth through it, or at least doesn't add extra friction or emotional labor demands from me), and ideally, basically be a competent therapist.
• In general, own the metacognition. i.e. be taking responsibility for keeping track of things, both on a minute-to-minute timescale, and the day-to-day or week-to-week timescale.
• Ability to get out of the way / quickly drop things if it doesn't turn out to be what I need, without it being a big deal. 

There are also important outside-the-container skillsets, such as:

• Be responsive in communication, so that it's easy to schedule with them. If it's too much of a pain to schedule, it kinda defeats the point.
• Potentially: proactively check in remotely during periods where I'm not actively hiring them. i.e. be a professional accountability buddy, maybe paid some base rate to briefly check in each day, with the ability to upsell into "okay today is a day that requires bigger metacognitive guns than Raemon has at the moment")

Even the minimum bar (i.e. "attentive body double") here is a surprisingly skilled position. It requires gentleness/unobtrusiveness, attentiveness, a good vibe. 

The skill ceiling, meanwhile, seems quite high. The most skilled versions of this are the sort of therapist or executive coach who would charge hundreds of dollars an hour. The sort of person who is really good at this tends to quickly find their ambitions outgrowing the role (same with good executive assistants, unfortunately).

Pitfalls

Common problems I've run into:

• Having trouble scheduling with people. If you want to specialize in this role, it's often important for people to contact you on a short timeline (i.e. I might notice I'm in a brainfoggy state and want someone to assist me like right now, or tomorrow), so, having a communication channel you check regularly so people can ping you about a job.
• Asking questions in a way that is annoying instead of helpful. Since the point is to be giving me more time, if I have to spend too much time explaining the situation to someone, it undoes the value of it. This requires either them being good at picking things up quickly without much explanation, or good at reading nonverbal cues that the current thread isn't worth it and we should move on.
• Spending too much time on unhelpful advice. Sometimes an assistant will have ideas that don't work out, and maybe push them more than appropriate. There's a delicate balance here because sometimes I am being avoidant or something and need advice outside of my usual wheelhouse, but generally if advice isn't feeling helpful, I think the assistant should back off and observe more and try to have a few other hypotheses about what to suggest if they feel that the assistee is missing something.
• Navigating weird dynamics around "having someone entirely optimized to help another person." Having this run smoothly, in a net helpful way, means having to actually be prioritizing my needs/goals in a way that would normally be pretty rude. If I constantly feel like there's social awkwardness / wariness about whether I'm making them feel bad, the whole thing is probably net negative. I think doing a good job of navigating this requires some nuance/emotional-skill on both parties, in terms of striking a vibe where it feels like you are productively collaborating.
  • (I think this likely works best when the person is really actively interested in the job "be a thinking assistant", as opposed to something they're doing because they haven't gotten traction on their real goals).

Ray’s Metacognitive Engine

• Twice a day, asking “what is the most important thing I could be working on and why aren’t I on track to deal with it?”
  • you probably want a more specific question (“important thing” is too vague). Three example specific questions (but, don’t be a slave to any specific operationalization)
    • what is the most important uncertainty I could be reducing, and how can I reduce it fastest?
    • what’s the most important resource bottleneck I can gain, or contribute to the ecosystem, and would gain me that resource the fastest?
    • what’s the most important goal I’m backchaining from?
• Have a mechanism to iterate on your habits that you use every day, and frequently update in response to new information
  • for me, this is daily prompts and weekly prompts, which are:
    • optimized for being the efficient metacognition I obviously want to do each day
    • include one skill that I want to level up in, that I can do in the morning as part of the meta-orienting (such as operationalizing predictions, or “think it faster”, or whatever specific thing I want to learn to attend to or execute better right now)
• The five requirements each fortnight:
  • be backchaining 
    • from the most important goals
  • be forward chaining 
    • through tractable things that compound
  • ship something 
    • to users every fortnight
  • be wholesome 
    • (that is, do not minmax in a way that will predictably fail later)
  • spend 10% on meta (more if you’re Ray in particular but not during working hours. During working hours on workdays, meta should pay for itself within a week)
• Correlates:
  • have a clear, written model of what you’re backchaining from
  • have a clear, written model of how you’re compounding
• The general problem solving approach:
  • breadth first
  • identify cruxes
  • connect inner-sim to cruxes / predictions
  • follow your heart
  • see how your predictions went
• Random ass skills
  • napping
  • managing working memory, innovating and applying on working memory tools
  • grieving
  • Generalizing

Skill I’m working on that hasn’t paid off yet but I believe in:

• At least once a day or so, when you notice a mistake or surprise, spent a couple minutes asking “how could I have thought that faster” (and periodically do deeper dives)
• each day/week, figure out what you’re confused or predictably going to tackle in a dumb way, and think in advance about how to be smart about it the first time

This is the sort of thing I find appealing to believe, but I feel at least somewhat skeptical of. I notice a strong emotional pull to want this to be true (as well as an interesting counterbalancing emotional pull for it to not be true). 

I don't think I've seen output from the people aspiring in this direction without being visibly quite smart to make me think "okay yeah it seems like it's on track in some sense."

I'd be interested in hearing more explicit cruxes from you about it.

I do think it's plausible than the "smart enough, creative enough, strong epistemics, independent, willing to spend years without legible output, exceptionally driven, and so on" are sufficient (if you're at least moderately-but-not-exceptionally-smart). Those are rare enough qualities that it doesn't necessarily feel like I'm getting a free lunch, if they turn out to be sufficient for groundbreaking pre-paradigmatic research. I agree the x-risk pipeline hasn't tried very hard to filter for and/or generate people with these qualities.

(well, okay, "smart enough" is doing a lot of work there, I assume from context you mean "pretty smart but not like genius smart")

But, I've only really seen you note positive examples, and this seems like the sort of thing that'd have a lot of survivorship bias. There can be tons of people obsessed, but not necessarily on the right things, and if you're not naturally the right cluster of obsessed + smart-in-the-right-way, I don't know whether trying to cultivate the obsession on purpose will really work. 

I do nonetheless overall probably prefer people who have all your listed qualities, and who also either can:

a) self-fund to pursue the research without having to make it legible to others
b) somehow figure out a way to make it legible along the way

I probably prefer those people to tackle "the hard parts of alignment" over many other things they could be doing, but not overwhelmingly obviously (and I think it should come with a background awareness that they are making a gamble, and if they aren't the sort of person who must make that gamble due to their personality makeup, they should be prepared for the (mainline) outcome that it just doesn't work out)

I'd sort of naively guess doing it with a stranger (esp. one not even in your circles) would be easier on the "feeling private/anxious about your productivity" – does that feel like it wouldn't work?

Okay a few people have DMd me, and I'm feeling some kind of vague friction that feels currently on track to be a dealbreaker so let's think that through here.

Problems:

• I can't tell offhand who's good at this, and while I think this is something someone with little experience could turn out to be good at, they often won't be, and it's kind of costly to spend a slot on them, especially if I really need someone competent at it.
• I often need someone "right now", and need a way to contact a bunch of people quickly, such that most of them will get the message and one of them will reply quickly, in a way that isn't too annoying for them but works.

I have a vision of a whole-ass website dedicated to facilitating this but right now want a quick hacky solution.

A group DM would work, but that feels like it'll produce weird competitive dynamics with who replies first but maybe isn't as good as the person who replies second.

DMing a bunch of people individually I guess is fine but but then I need to go find them.

A requirement for everyone participating as an assistant is that they have a way of being contacted that they'll respond to quickly.

I've added lyrics to this post for now (if you expand each section)