Against lone wolf self-improvement

if your problem is, say, "I need to complete my thesis", there's only as much that we can do to help

Recommend someone who writes that stuff for money? That already improves one's economical thinking. :P

My post was about classes, not "self-improvement communities". I'm very skeptical about the latter.

For writing a thesis, I guess a class in scientific writing (with lots of practice) would be helpful.

It would be accurate to say that self-directed improvement has a lot of failure modes that are hard to recognize from the inside -- human biases and all. Working with others in a shared environment with scientific ground rules ensures that your biases and their biases form a non intersecting set and you're left with the truth.

I work in open source and it is very often the case that someone new comes to the project with a gigantic, unreviewable pile of changes that they want merged. Almost inevitably, it is 90% bad changes on top of 10% of innovation, and the bad came about because they didn't understand what they were changing or the reason for its existence. The 10% is good but they've got to go back and extract it out which is a long and protracted process. Much better to have been involved in the community from the beginning, where they would have had things they wouldn't have thought of themselves pointed out and learned bits that they wouldn't have thought relevant, but are.

Yeah, I agree that schools often have too much coursework. I think it's still worth it because you get a wider view of the field (and I didn't drop out), but YMMV.

This is a mean vs median or Mediocristan vs Extremistan issue. Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.

I cannot disagree with this more strongly. I am serial entrepreneur, and a somewhat successful one. Still chasing the big exit, but I've built successful companies that are still private. Besides myself I've met many other people in this industry which you'd be excused for thinking are lone wolfs. But the truth is the lone wolf's don't make it as they build things that fail to have product/market fit, fail to listen to feedback if and when it is even made available to them (since they don't seek it), and usually fail to raise or maintain funding from lack of communication and organizational skill.

The successful entrepreneurs, hedge funders, etc. are not afraid of thinking that conventional wisdom is wrong. The success they have is not from trailblazing a new path -- that just goes with doing something new -- but from having the tenacity to ask "but why is that so?" of conventional wisdom. Every now and then you find something that just shouldn't be so -- it has no good justification except historical accident -- and then you execute. And a very important part of execution is building a team that can work together to avoid the heuristics and biases that follow lone wolfs around.

Don't be a lone wolf. Be a social rationalist willing to question everything and go where that takes you. It's not the same thing.

Taking classes is a relatively Mediocristan-style way to work with others, but there are other ways that get you Extremistan-style upside.

One way is to find a close collaborator or two. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman had an extremely close collaboration, doing most of their thinking in conversation as they were developing the field of heuristics and biases research (as described in The Undoing Project). It's standard startup advice to have more than one founder so that you'll have someone "to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong." Etc.

Another way is to have a group of several people who are all heavily into the same thing. If the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys is accurate, many innovations in skateboarding came from a group of teenage skateboarders who hung out together in Southern California in the 1970s. People who are trying to understand the state of the art in an intellectual field often put together a reading group to discuss the latest essays in that field and spin off their own ideas (e.g., John Stuart Mill talks about studying political economy and syllogistic logic in this way, which led to new ideas & publications). Etc.

I think this discussion is somewhat confused by the elision of the difference between 'autodidact' and 'lone wolf'. 'Autodidact', in internet circles, is generally used to mean 'anyone who learns things primarily outside a formalized educational environment'; it's possible to be an autodidact while still being heavily engaged with communities and taking learning things as a social endeavor and so on, and in fact Eliezer was active in communities related to LW's subject matter for a long time before he started LW. By the same token, one of the main things I took from reading Ben Franklin's autobiography was that, despite having little formal schooling and being solely credited for many of his innovations, he didn't actually do it alone. I doubt he would've been even a tenth as successful as he was without something like his Junto.

Some people will get more out of formal education than others, although getting things out of formal education is itself a skill that can be learned. (It seems to require an ability to buy into institutions on an emotional level that many of us lack. I saw college as an obnoxious necessity rather than a set of opportunities, and as a result got much less out of it than I could have. This seems to be a common mistake.) But I just don't think it's possible to become a spectacular writer, or even a middling one, as a lone wolf. If nothing else, you need feedback from a community in order to improve. Look at lone-wolf outsider art -- it's frequently unusual, but how much of it is good?

Now most people who do that will end up terrible writers. But when someone like Eliezer does it, the results are spectacular.

You could have found a more convincing example.

The objective metrics of quality of literature are hard to come by, but HPMOR does suffer from quite many, many stereotypical sins of fanfic / bad genre writing and makes a tiresome read. (One that I found especially grating and made me finally drop the story altogether could be described as "my main character is not OP because I set up these plainly arbitrary obstacles as a 'balance' ". Please, no. There's more to writing enjoyable, interesting characters in meaningful stories than such naive "balancing". The preferable end result is a piece of fiction that has something more going in them than surface-level entertainment plot which is amenable to measured in terms such as "is my character OP".)

However, I did not register an account just to lambaste Eliezer's fiction. Here's a couple of points that hopefully tie this comment to the main thread of discussion (so that this contribution provides some signal instead of pure noise):

1. Taking a year-long course in lit or at least some input from the tradition of literature might have improved Eliezer's writing. A class isn't the only way to attain that input, but it certainly helps in finding out if you have missed something vital in your self-study. (After finding out those pieces of information you are free to judge and dismiss them, too, if you want, but you are now dismissing that information with the knowledge that it exists, which is prone to make your act of dismissal more intelligent and productive.)

2. I don't have exhaustive collection of biographies at hand, but I believe the general trend in "successful writing" is that the significant portion (probably majority) of successful writers (including, but not limited to, authors included in the Western canon as creators of "good literature"), read a lot, wrote a lot, and had a lot of corrective input to improve their writing during their writing careers. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if prior to starting a writing career, they already had lots of corrective input to improve their general storytelling skills before they even started considering writing. The input came in the form of teachers, friends who reviewed their manuscripts in process (or commented on their stories), how popular their first published drabbles were, and (often most importantly) the input given by the publishing house editors whose job is to improve writing of authors who submit their fiction for publishing.

Why not both? The English literature lessons and sci-fi novels / anime / fan fiction.

I don't know much about writing, but e.g. studying computer science at universities does not seem to prevent people from creating open source software.

You can also have impact by being okay at several things. For example, I'm okay at both algorithms and UI, so I can get hired easily and then have my pick of projects (because most programmers prefer backend work). If I was also okay at writing or management, I'd probably be rich by now. I think Eliezer's success was also due to being good at several things, not being the best at one thing.

If you want to do history seriously, I think it makes sense to do it in academia. It's too easy to go off the rails otherwise.

More generally, there are two kinds of things we want to learn:

1) Purely intellectual areas, like math or programming. LWers have a comparative advantage here. But the uncomfortable truth is that most people who succeed in those areas had lots of schooling. (For example, Linus has a master's in CS, Google came out of a PhD project, and the idea of AI risk originated from academics like I.J. Good and Nick Bostrom.)

2) Areas with a physical or emotional component, like drawing, swimming, welding or public speaking. LWers have no comparative advantage here, and I strongly recommend everyone to take a "lowest common denominator" class. You'll be surprised how well it matches your ability.

I think LWers are above average at learning intellectual topics, but average (or below) at tasks that have a physical or emotional component. If you want to learn drawing, driving, swimming, public speaking or any other skill that isn't purely intellectual, taking a lowest common denominator class is good advice.

having a real-human teacher

Do you actually need a real-human meatbag teacher? Or would a sufficiently sophisticated virtual avatar be good enough?

What if you could impress your VR waifu by doing math problems? X-D

Hahahaha, this is so funny. You've never attended a seriously challenging class your entire life, I take it?

Got my masters in math with honors somehow...

That said, I believe that moderate effort leads to fastest learning, and nothing is inherently hard to learn but lots of things are poorly taught. In fields with a strong genius myth, like math or physics, that turns into a macho attitude which stops people from even trying to teach well. Other fields got over it, for example a Betty Edwards style drawing class leads to almost guaranteed improvement for amateurs at any age and doesn't take much effort at all. Similar with language classes, sports, etc. One thing these areas have in common is that they took the time to develop mental cues that work for most people, instead of saying "here's the material, now bang your head on it". Willpower is basically a poor substitute for pedagogy.

Possibly, lone wolf self-improvement works better when your life is not full of distracting things. But with distractions, classes work better, because they keep returning your focus to the thing you wanted to learn. They provide you a distraction-free window of time.

If classes work better for most of the population, including students (which seems to be the case), I suspect that an average person is quite distracted even without marriage / kids / job. Probably normies cannot stop thinking about social drama and stuff.

I think only a small minority of people are "naturals" at their chosen activity, and even they often get support from other "naturals" somehow. For me, encouragement always played a huge role. All my attempts to learn stuff in a supportive setting worked very well, and all my attempts to learn stuff in isolation failed.

If you try lone wolf and succeed, more power to you. My post is aimed at those who repeatedly try and fail. There are many such people. LW has been mostly telling them to try harder, hack themselves, etc. That advice is harmful. I think it's important to make a clean break from advice that's harmful to many people.

In contrast, advising people to take classes is much less harmful. It doesn't push them into a cycle of guilt and self-abuse for the rest of their lives, as lone wolf advice does. They just take the class, learn the stuff (most people who take classes do end up learning stuff), and move on.

I'll second that it's relevant. Links should say what they point to though. In this case, it was: Idea for LessWrong: Video Tutoring

Not sure I believe in self-improvement without learning. If you aren't learning, you'll just slide back.

I don't see how this is limited to academic learning.

I would suggest doing the obvious thing of doing some reading. As a lone wolf. Then doing the obvious thing and make an appointment.

Some of these obvious things are more obvious than others.

Yeah, that seems to be the biggest flaw in the post. I shouldn't have addressed it to everyone, it's intended mostly for people suffering from "akrasia". I.e. if lone wolf is working for you, ignore the post. If it isn't, notice that and change course.

That probably wouldn't work well for me, because I want to interact with people while learning. But still, which courses would you recommend?