Soft skills can be trained. This seems silly, but apparently my previous model of the world was that you could learn how to do math and physics and programming, but “making good conversation” and “being perceptive” and “understanding how people think” were things that you were born with. It turns out that this is, um, not true. Talk about learned helplessness.
Many effective-altruist organizations are bottlenecked on funding and people. First, I thought they were bottlenecked on funding, because the nonprofit sector was flooded with willing people—but it turns out the EA sector specifically isn’t. Then I thought it was bottlenecked on people because there were plenty of people earning to give—but that’s not true either. Actually, they’re bottlenecked on both! So it seems like when deciding whether to do direct work or earn to give, I should focus mostly on my comparative advantage rather than solving the coordination problem.
Your brain is not a thing. Well, specifically, it’s a bunch of things (or “subsystems” or whatever if you want to get technical). And sometimes they disagree violently about what to do. One of the most useful things that’s happened to me this year is that I got better at noticing when different systems were disagreeing. When I don’t realize this, the systems have something like a “shouting match” and whichever one is loudest wins. But when I notice it, I can consciously separate the two sides, listen to both and take everyone’s evidence into account—which works much better for decision-making than a yelling contest.
Thinking of examples is a mild superpower. Sometimes some irritating part of my brain decides to believe general principles because they’re aesthetically pleasing or an in-group signal rather than because there’s actual evidence for them, and then I walk around with beliefs like “Harvard is full of people who are just there for the brand name”.1 I’ve gotten better at avoiding this by making sure that whenever I assert some general fact, I can give specific examples of it as well.
In reality, Harvard is full of people who think that Harvard is full of people who are just there for the brand name. ↩︎
Comments
“One of the most useful things that’s happened to me this year is that I got better at noticing when different systems were disagreeing.”
I would really like to know how to do this.
Ben, maybe take a look at this Checklist of Rationality Habits, by Anna Salamon and Eliezer Yudkowsky, especially the third part.
Ben: one way is to assign explicit labels to the different systems, the way Harry does in HPMoR.
A good way to find the different systems is goal factoring or a similar process: writing out common actions -> motivations -> deeper motivations until you get to things that feel intrinsic.
See e.g. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2013/07/do-your-goals-conflict-with-your-personality/ or (self-promotion) http://satvikberi.com/2013/08/08/identity-factoring/
Divia and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the Internal Family Systems model of psychology. It recognizes the non-unitary and conflicting aspects of the mind, which I think is critical in any theory of psychology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model
Ben K: your comment about “realizing soft skills are skills” seems pretty similar to Anna Salamon’s post “learned blankness”: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5a9/learned_blankness/
It may be useful to ask if there are any other abilities you mark as “ things”, which you therefore can’t do.
Satvik, yes, that’s exactly what it is. The LW post itself has some good suggestions for other areas to look at, but I can’t come up with any other blank areas for me immediately (though I guess “soft skills” is pretty broad). I guess personality features are the closest thing–I feel like I have an appropriate model of how malleable personality can be, but I also don’t feel a pressing need to try changing anything personality-wise, so perhaps System 1 doesn’t quite understand that yet.
I’m not surprised if such areas are just hard to find, but do you have any suggestions for ways to find them? (Or blank areas that you think I might have? Crocker’s rules on this.)
No blind spots of yours come to mind, but I’ll let you know if I notice anything (and will appreciate you doing the same.)
Noticing blind spots is, of course, hard. The method that worked best for me was caring intensely about something where success seemed impossible, but I absolutely had to succeed. From about 2008-2011 this forced me to run into a lot of my blind spots and accomplish several things I had previously thought were impossible at a rate I had not achieved previously or since. So, caring + external feedback may be a fairly efficient long-term method.