can you say the types of problems they are?

can you say more about your reasoning for this?

Excellent work! Thanks for what you do

fwiw while it's fair to call this "heavy nudging", this mirrors exactly what my prompts for agentic workflows look like. I have to repeat things like "Don't DO ANYTHING YOU WEREN'T ASKED" multiple times to get them to work consistently.

I found this post to be incredibly useful to get a deeper sense of Logan's work on naturalism.

I think his work on Naturalism is a great and unusual example of original research happening in the rationality community and what actually investigating rationality looks like.

In my role as Head of Operations at Monastic Academy, every person in the organization is on a personal improvement plan that addresses the personal responsibility level, and each team in the organization is responsible for process improvements that address the systemic level.

In the performance improvement weekly meetings, my goal is to constantly bring them back to the level of personal responsibility.  Any time they start saying the reason they couldn't meet their improvement goal was because of X event or Y person, I bring it back. What could THEY have done differently, what internal psychological patterns prevented them from doing that, and what can they do to shift those patterns this week.

Meanwhile, each team also chooses process improvements weekly.  In those meetings, my role is to do the exact opposite, and bring it back to the level of process.  Any time they're examining a team failure and come to the conclusion "we just need to prioritize it more, or try harder, or the manager needs to hold us to something",  I bring it back to the level of process. How can we change the order or way we do things, or the incentives involved, such that it's not dependent on any given person's ability to work hard or remember or be good at a certain thing.

Personal responsibility and systemic failure are different levels of abstraction.

If you're within the system and doing horrible things while saying, "🤷 It's just my incentives, bro," you're essentially allowing the egregore to control you, letting it shove its hand up your ass and pilot you like a puppet.

At the same time, if you ignore systemic problems, you're giving the egregore power by pretending it doesn't exist—even though it’s puppeting everyone. By doing so, you're failing to claim your own power, which lies in recognizing your ability to work towards systemic change.

Both truths coexist:

• There are those perpetuating evil by surrendering their personal responsibility to an evil egregore.
• There are those perpetuating evil by letting the egregore run rampant and denying its existence.

The solution requires addressing both levels of abstraction.

I think the model of "Burnout as shadow values" is quite important and loadbearing in my own model of working with many EAs/Rationalists.  I don't think I first got it from this post but I'm glad to see it written up so clearly here.