I have a pet theory about how people become ambitious and agenty. I was about to write up some insight porn about it, and then was like "you know, Raemon, you should probably actually think about about this for real, since it seems like Pet Psychology Theories are one of the easier ways to get stuck in dumb cognitive traps." "How do people get ambitious and agenty" seems to be something people should have actually tried to study before. I’m thinking something as simple as "interviewing lots of people and checking for common patterns." 2 seconds spent on google scholar suggested I could use better keywords. Curious if anyone has looked into this (either reviewing existing literature, or conducting interviews themselves or otherwise trying to tackle the question in a serious way) For clarity, the two phenomena I want to understand better are:
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*Ambition. *How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
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*Agency. *How do people generally gain the capacity to be self-motivated, think through plans, and decide how to pursue goals that will change the world (changing it in small ways is fine)
Tongue-in-cheek: "when their pathological need to do something outweighs their pathological need to do nothing." In more detail: there are several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that ambition might be powered by, and I think the resulting different kinds of ambition are different enough to discuss as distinct entities (in particular, they vary in how prosocial they are). Some possibilities off the top of my head, not mutually exclusive, inspired by Enneagram types:
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Thanks. This is a different lens than my pet theory but seems pretty compatible with it. My pet theory was specifically "one contributor towards people becoming ambitious is having someone they respect tell them that they believe in them (credibly signaling it by spending at least a few hours talking to them about their projects and goals and how to achieve them)." This is based on what happened to me and a few other people I know who gained certain kinds of ambition. [This comes with some background beliefs that ambition is generally good, in particular when the ambition is of the form ‘create something’, rather than ‘be the best at something’ (which is zero-sum). This may be a different lens than you’re currently looking through] This seems somewhat downstream of the sort of thing you’re point at here, which seems to be pointing at two clusters:
What sort of personality do you need to have for "become ambitious" to be a live option (including healthy and unhealthy mechanisms)
What sort of things could actively harm your capacity for ambition. Both of which suggest much earlier interventions than what I was thinking about. I basically want all the interventions going on, but at the earlier stages, it’s not obvious that the right thing for a person is to become *ambitious. *Rather, I want them to have a psychologically outlook that lets them be generally physically and emotionally healthy and reasonably productive (because these are generally good things). Once they get to that stage, maybe the right thing for them is to tackle ambitious projects, maybe not. But it seems better to think of interventions at that stage to be more oriented towards ‘help the person become generally healthy’ rather than ‘help them become ambitious.’ For people just reaching the stage where they’re considering an ambitious project (either one that’ll directly accomplish something, or help them grow) I think having a someone give them a few hours of encouragement and guidance is a fairly high-value-for-low-cost. (This does seem like something that might be most relevant for people motivated by approval of others, although I think might also fit with other motivation clusters. Possible exception that people motivated by power seem least likely to need someone else to believe in them to pursue power?)
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Yeah, I agree that at the earlier stages it’s not clear that ambition is a thing to aim for, and I would also advise people to prioritize health broadly. I agree that encouragement and guidance is good, and more generally think that mentorship is really, really deeply important. I am not about this "individual rationality" life anymore. It’s group rationality or nothing.
The literature on learned helplessness describes how to destroy ambition. That suggests that any good answer should resemble moving away from those situations.
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What is good literature on learned helplessness?
Seems to me like what happens is that redirection of sex or survival drives get caught up in some sort of stable configuration where they can never be satisfied yet the person doesn’t notice that aspect of the loop and thus keeps Doing the Thing far past the time normal people notice. Essentially they’ve goodharted themselves in a way that creates positive externalities for others.
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Right, this is the kind of thing I had in mind with the phrase "pathological need to do something." Cf. people who are obsessed with making way more money than they could ever possibly spend.
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It’s goodharting from the point of view of natural selection’s values but it doesn’t have to be goodharting from the point of view of your values. We can enjoy art even if art is in some sense goodharting on e.g. being in beautiful places or whatever.
I was reminded of this anecdote of how the US Marines train agency. The part about encouragement from superiors in areas where the recruits are the weakest, sounds somewhat similar to your theory of mysterious old wizards.
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Thanks! This seems quite relevant!
I haven’t looked at this in a serious way, but have thought about. I think basically all of the ways people become more ambitious have to do with increasing either the self-efficacy of the person expecting to be able to do big things, or the reward that the person would get from doing big things. Here are some common examples I’ve seen in biographies and acquaintances:
Further Braindump: Goal: I’m interesting specifically in unambitious people who *become ambitious. *(Mostly because this seems like the most useful/interesting lever to push on. The broader goal is figure out ‘what would help people become more ambitious in a healthy/productive way at scale’). Some people seem "born ambitious" but there’s not a lot I can change my actions based on that. Related questions:
What’s a list of people who "are ambitious"? Potentially including:
people I know who seem ambitious
think for 5 minutes listing famous people
how do I get non-famous people? are famous people representative?
Rich people (Forbes 500 list)
Startup Founders
People who launch movements (see wikipedia list of movements. Who founded them, and/or took over them?)
People who have biographies written about them
Might conflate people who "have an ambition" vs "people who are generically ambitious" but that might be fine for now
Is there a procedure you can easily do to check biographies for "what was their main causal factors towards ambition" at moderate scale?
Who has thought about ambition through this lens?
Paul Graham and other YCombinator folk probably have.
What has Paul Graham has written about this topic?
Cities and Ambition
Anatomy of Determination (in which he claims ambition is an important element of determination)
How easy it is to ask him about different angles on questions he’s previously explored? Does he respond on Twitter or email or whatev?
What is the existing literature on ambition?
Scan through google scholar or whatever
Who in the rationality community has already thought about this a bunch?
How many startups have gotten a million users?
How many songs or youtube videos have gotten a million unique views?
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As Tracey Davis would say, that’s not true! And what’s it mean? Seems like there’s power over others and power over things to happen. To become ambitious about the first kind, most people only need a chance to taste and realize what it is they’re tasting. The setting might be for the greater good, the reflection might discourage the pupil, but the option will be on the table. As to the power over things to happen, it requires serious autonomy (an ability to pick the real dependencies between things and to keep a roof over one’s head meanwhile) and/or serious despair (as in people who might survive cancer).
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I’m having trouble parsing this comment (in part because I can’t tell which part of my comment this is replying to). Could you restate it?
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Sorry, I often have this problem. I mean that ‘ambitious’ people might be ‘just generally ambitious’ - I see some of them when they come to buy books on self-help or startups or esoteric things. They might be ‘ambitious, as in wanting to have power over other people’, & then they buy books on, say, romantic relationships or English for two-year-olds, or planners; but largely it’s also a hobby. Some of them do get to wield this power and are content with it. Some do collect thousands of likes on Facebook or Youtube, and are visible, and therefore counted ambitious by others. And then there are people who want power over things, over events in the world. The least ‘personal’ example is a scientist, but the volunteer who sends winter clothes to families living on occupied land and the sniper who crouches on the roof above a demonstration, they also belong to this species. And I have yet to peg them down when they enter my bookstore. They are… invisible.
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I think the category I’m most interested in is something like "ambitious creators", and I’d expect them to buy books related to whatever thing they’re trying to create. (They would probably buy some books on self help and entrepreneurship, and they’d also buy books about music or math or programming or whatever)
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Hmm, they must be rare. Most likely, shopping online and in English… one side of ambitiousness would be then ‘willingness to pay’, maybe even ‘willingness to pay to become known as such a person’.
I remain confused about your definitions. From the Paul Graham article:
This would suggest a definition of "ambition" as it is commonly used: the tendency to choose big goals. On the other hand, you say:
Okay, now I have a little insight into your motivations for thinking about this: you want to become more "ambitious" yourself. But this suggest "ambitious" to mean rather something like "capable of achieving big goals"—you don’t need to attain the "tendency to choose big goals", because that’s trivially easy, and anyway, if you care about this topic, that means you already have big goals.
So, does your question in the OP mean something along the lines of "how do people become capable of achieving big goals"?
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I think you’re equivocating between two possible meanings of "choose" here. There’s "choose" as in you start telling people "I want to write a book" and then there’s "choose" as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
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Ah, yes, when I say "choose", I mean system-2-choose (i.e. the former meaning in your comment). Learning how to
(i.e. how to work with setting intentions, or in general, how to overcome akrasia) would already be a to-do included on the big to-do list called "achieving goal X".
In any case, if I understand it correctly, the question still is: how do people become capable of achieving big goals, including whatever system-1 manipulation, intention-setting, habit-forming, incentive-landscape-shaping, motivation-hacking, etc. is necessary to achieve these goals?
[WIP] Review of paper "On the value of Aiming High – The causes and consequences of ambition"
Link to PDF Partial summary: They discuss a bunch of ways they might define ambition, from a common sense or psychology standpoint. Eventually they define it thus: > Ambition is the persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment.> Ambition involves persistence and generality in that we do not expect that ambition ceases to exist once a certain level of attainment is achieved, nor do we believe that ambition is compartmentalized toward success in only a single sphere. Ambition also generally has been taken to reflect striving for position and wealth and not to indicate strivings for general well-being and socioemotional acceptance. In short, ambition is about attaining rather than achieving (though of course there is a certain relationship between the two). This isn’t quite the thing I meant, but seems relevant enough to be interesting and keep reading.
Hypotheses
They go on to make some hypotheses: Antecedents of ambition: Hypothesis 1: Conscientiousness will be positively related to ambition. 2. Extraversion will be positively related to ambition. 3. Neuroticism will be negatively related to ambition. 4. General mental ability will be positively related to ambition. 5. Parents’ occupational prestige will be positively related to ambition. Consequences of ambition 6a. Ambition will be positively related to the quantity of educational attainment. 6b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to educational attainment 7a. Ambition will be positively related to income 7b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to income. 8a. Ambition will be positively related to occupational attainment. 8b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to occupational attainment. Will write up more as I find time.
Ruby recently wrote this, which seems relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k2KwBEq4ToXnvZSbz/on-the-nature-of-agency
I’ve been reading lesswrong on and off for about 7 years (hpmor is great). I realized today that I’ve never had Agency (My life has been a haphazard mess, but I’m lucky to be in an okay place). It’s funny to see this question pop up today of all days. A guess to an answer to your question: They’d need to realize that intelligence is a thing, they’d need to see from outside of themselves that the brain is this thing that thinks and does and is weird. Theeeen they would need some values or goals to pursue. Values like "self improvement" and goals like "I want to be able to afford the best food in the world 24/7″