I was talking with someone about why most EAs are not a good romantic match for me, and I said "well, for one thing, most of them are not ambitious enough."

I had to clarify that when I said "ambitious", I didn't mean "aiming to get a prestigious high paying, conventional job."
It was disheartening to me to realize that what most people mean by the world "ambitious" is something that I consider somewhere between boring and pathetic, because I had been previously thinking that it was a key-word that filters for part of what I care about.
The thing I care about is something more like "in whatever you're trying to do, refusing to be satisfied with the level of success that is typical, or that others of expect of you."
eg aiming to actually have a correct world model, despite how "everyone's biased".

Striving to makes something truly great, worthy of admission to the cannon of your craft: a truly great novel, truly great software, a truly great company culture. Work that goes above and beyond.
Or after every success, asking how you could save an order of magnitude more lives / do an order of magnitude more good / create an order of magnitude more value, instead of getting comfortable doing the same thing over and over again.
Or working tirelessly to bring to fruition some vision that you can see, despite the fact that when you talk to most people about it, they tell you that that reference class has already been explored.

(h/t @Conaw, as an example now legible to most people.)
Or striving to literally, not as a buzz word, but for real, change the world.

Like, human history flows in a different direction than the counterfactual, because you happened to be born.
See also, the virtue of perfectionism.

yudkowsky.net/rational/virtu…
To be clear, not everyone needs to be ambitious, and I love many people who aren't.

But compared to the thing that I mean here, "acquire prestige" is so lame.

Instead of working your ass off to do something great, you work your ass off for social approval? Come on.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Eli Tyre

Eli Tyre Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @EpistemicHope

13 Aug
I want to add some clarification here, because the way I phrased this makes it sound like I'm insisting on ambition in a partner, which is not quite right.
The main thing is that a causal outsider might think "there must be lots of EA women who are like, and who might want to date, Eli."

And there's a mistake here, which is reading most EAs as doing pretty much the same thing as me.

Which is not how I conceptualize it at all.
There is a foundational thing that I share with EA culture, which is something like a desire to help + basic quantitative reasoning + the idea that we should check that our "helping" actually helps.
Read 53 tweets
8 Aug
If you’re calling it “overthinking”, then you’re doing it wrong.
I have some annoyance at people who assume that thinking A LOT, about something simple, means that you’re overthinking it.

It seems to me, that this could equally mean that THEY’re bad at thinking, and so can’t imagine how doing more of it would help.
OK. So this tweet was coming from a place of annoyance, But phrasing it like that, I feel compassion for people that don’t know how to think well enough for it to be a useful thing to do.
Read 5 tweets
8 Aug
I think this zeros in on a narrow category ("scapegoating"), that is a member of a larger class of phenomena.
In a conversation that with semantic content about anything important, there are two "layers" that are unfolding in parallel:

There's abstracted, literal modeling of a situation.

And there's social-political effects of the speech acts.
Read 35 tweets
8 Aug
Yeah, exactly this.

The Powers That Be actually DO regularly lie to us “for our own good”. I’m very sympathetic to not trusting them, because I don’t, and I think one mostly shouldn’t.
The vaccines appear to be genuinely super great (+1 humanity!).

But unless you can read the stats (which apparently most people can’t), all you have to go on is whether or not you trust the Powers That Be and what your friends are doing.

3
Read 5 tweets
6 Aug
People in my circles sometimes talk about "civilizational collapse" or "civilizational decay" or "decay of societal fabric".

It sure seems like there's a real thing here, but when people use those words, I usually don't know what they mean.
As a starting point for discussion, what are some concrete indicators of more or less severe decay?

Some that occur to me [in no particular order]:
- No “sophisticated” [operationalize] international supply chains.
- The US government/society can’t respond effectively to COVID.
- The US government can’t keep law and order. To the extent that people are safe from crime, it’s because they pay tribute to gangs.
- Some largish percentage of the population considers the US government to be illegitimate.
Read 9 tweets
5 Aug
Hm. This was a bit eye-opening.

My personal experience of Berkeley is not this.

There has been a notable increase in homeless people on the streets this year, but they don't bother me, so far at least.
I've talked with some of them, and they seem like non-threatening, moderately interesting, people.

Not exactly "normal", but not threatening.

Like a guy with a dog, who has a hobby of making jewelry, who sleeps in a tent on the sidewalk. He seems chill.
I don't feel worried about crime.

I was minorly baffled to read Scott make a joke about how in SF crime is legal, in ACX, today. I guess this is what he was talking about?

But this is news to me. (Not surprising since, as noted recently, I don't read news.)
Read 10 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(