Noticing Panic

post by Cole Wyeth (Amyr) · 2024-02-05T03:45:51.794Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

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In Competent Elites [LW · GW] @Eliezer Yudkowsky [LW · GW] discusses "executive nature," which he describes as the ability to "function without recourse," to make decisions without some higher decision maker to fall back on.

I do not have executive nature. 

I like to be well prepared. I like to read every word of every chapter of a textbook before a problem set, take a look, give the last chapter another skim, and then start working. 

Being thrust into a new job and forced to explore a confusing repository and complete an open ended project is... stressful. The idea of founding a startup terrifies me (how could I settle on one business idea to throw years of my life at? And just thinking about the paperwork and legal codes that I would have to learn fills me with dread).

There's a particular feeling I get just before freezing up in situations like this. It involves a sinking suspicion that failure is inevitable, a loss of self confidence, and a sort of physical awkwardness or even claustrophobia, like trying to claw my way up the sheer wall of a narrow shaft. In a word, it is panic. 

I believe that this is, for me, the feeling of insufficient executive nature. 

It may sound a little discouraging, but the very consistency of this feeling is, perhaps, a key to overcoming my limitations. 

The rationalist technique that I've found most useful is probably noticing confusion. It is useful because it is a trigger to re-evaluate my beliefs. It is a clue that an active effort must be made to pursue epistemic rigor before instinctively brushing over important evidence. In a way, "noticing confusion" is useful because it links my abstract understanding of Bayes with the physical and emotional experience of being a human. It is not, by itself, a recipe for correct epistemic conduct, but it provides a precious opportunity to take hold of the mind and steer it down a wiser path.

Perhaps noticing panic is for planning and acting what noticing confusion is for belief. 

So how should one act when noticing panic?

I do not know yet. But I do have a guess. 

I think that I panic when there are too many levels of planning between me and an objective.

For instance, a simple task like performing a calculation or following a recipe has zero levels of planning. Solving a more difficult problem, for instance a routine proof, might have one level of planning: I do not know how to write down the proof, but I know I can (typically) come up with it by rereading the last couple of sections for definitions and reasoning through their conclusions. Solving a harder problem might require an unknown approach; I might have to consider which background I need to fill in to prepare myself to undertake it, and the correct route to a proof may not be clear; this is of course the third level. At the fourth level, I might not even know how to reason about what background I might need (sticking with mathematical examples, if a very difficult problem remains open for long enough, conventional approaches have all failed, and becoming an expert in any mainstream topic is unlikely to be sufficient - one strategy for succeeding where others have failed is to specialize in a carefully chosen esoteric area which no one else has realized is even related. Of course mathematicians usually only do this by accident). 

I actually suspect that many engineering tasks are pretty high up this hierarchy, which may be one reason I am less comfortable with them than theoretical work. Though much of an engineer's work is routine, roadblocks are often encountered, and after every out-of-the-box solution fails, it's often unclear what to even try next. A lot of mucking about ensues until eventually a hint (like a google-able line in a stack trace) appears, which... leads nowhere. The process continues for an indeterminate amount of time until something works. It's hard to say in advance how many levels of planning are even needed in this example.

Founding a startup sounds like it's at a level of nearly unbounded depth. 

My intuition is that highly competent executives are able to weather these depths by calmly assessing the number of levels of planning between themselves and a solution, and then working through each level without worrying about the later ones. In a sense, this transforms a level n problem into a level 0 problem: a sequence of steps. The first step might be something like "figure out how best to learn how to invent new rocket designs." Obviously, this doesn't trivialize the problem because each step may be very tricky, requiring various forms of competence and intelligence. But I think that when a highly competent executive fails, it's usually not because they face several levels of planning, conclude the problem is beyond them, and panic. It's usually because they just don't do one of the steps well enough. 

In this sense, executive nature might put a person functionally on level infinity. 

(If this is true, there's a kind of "planning competence escape velocity." I've sometimes toyed with the hypothesis that deeply understanding the recursion theorem is a litmus test for "complex concept understanding escape velocity." Perhaps a person who combines the two would be robustly agentic).   

Breaking a problem down in this way is a technique it should be possible to refine and deploy when I notice panic.

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