Published on January 30, 2025 2:32 AM GMT
Motivation
Richard Hamming was a mathematician who worked at Bell Labs during the 1940s-1970s. He had a habit of sitting down with scientists in other fields and asking them “What are the important problems of your field?” After they explained their field's most important open problem, he would ask them: why aren't you working on that?
-Appendix: Hamming Questions, from the CFAR Handbook
This post starts off by asking an analogous pair of questions:
Who is the most skilled/generally capable/cognitively powerful person you know?
and subsequently
Why don't you talk to them more?
(If you did not already pause to ask yourself those questions and come up with some sort of answer, I recommend you take a minute or so to do it.)
I want to become stronger. I want to not only absorb the powers of those around me, but go on to surpass them. I do this because I have something to protect, and right now it's looking like it'll require a truly extraordinary effort in order to protect the things I care about in the medium and long term. So here's one of the things I do about it.
1. Find the most skilled/generally capable/cognitively powerful person you know.
If there are more than one of them who seem obviously highly skilled, then choose all of them. This process is easier if the people chosen in this step are at least a level above you, but this is not strictly necessary. People have non-overlapping skillsets, so a vast majority of pairs of people have at least something to absorb from each other. Still, we're trying to level up quickly, which means picking the person who you can absorb the most power from.
2. Talk to them more. Absorb their powers.
This can be as simple as "you seem competent, how did you do X thing/come up with X idea?" This can feel weird and induce some anxiety since it goes against the social grain in many circles, but it is generally flattering enough to the recipient that it outweighs those considerations. In rationalist circles, this is a perfectly normal-seeming question, of course, so no need to worry if you're in such a circle. Other ideas for questions:
- Ask what they're tracking in their head.Ask what their most useful cognitive skill is.Ask what lessons they've learned from people at a level above theirs.Ask them for advice on something you're considering.Ask them what they do to level up and compare this to your strategies.Pay attention to the small ways they tackle questions, the little choices they make without realizing. This is how to learn the things that are hard to explicitly teach.
Latch onto them. Ask them as many questions as you can manage without bothering them. Notice your confusion about why they are the way they are, and then seek to destroy your confusion.
Then internalize it. Understand what it's like to have the powers that they have, and then use them yourself. Don't try to become exactly them; become a levelled up version of you.
3. Recurse
Ask them the first modified Hamming Question at the beginning of this post:
Who is the most skilled/generally capable/cognitively powerful person you know?
and subsequently
Can you put me in touch with that person?
You can also do this by finding your way into the spaces that the person you're absorbing power from hangs out in, and then find new people from there. Both are solid strategies that have caused me to meet very informative new people to absorb power from.
Discuss
