People watching - Revision history

Issa at 00:52, 17 July 2021

2021-07-17T00:52:14Z

Issa: /* Insights/red pills */

2020-08-25T19:14:19Z

‎Insights/red pills

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2020-08-16T18:48:35Z

‎Insights/red pills

Issa: /* Techniques */

2020-06-06T09:35:37Z

‎Techniques

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2020-06-03T08:49:56Z

‎Insights/red pills

Issa: /* Insights/red pills */

2020-06-03T08:47:42Z

‎Insights/red pills

Issa: /* Insights/red pills */

2020-06-02T10:08:42Z

‎Insights/red pills

Issa at 10:03, 2 June 2020

2020-06-02T10:03:07Z

Issa: /* Insights/red pills */

2020-05-29T23:21:43Z

‎Insights/red pills

Issa: /* Techniques */

2020-05-29T23:18:36Z

‎Techniques

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 * find recommendations that smart people make (sometimes works, but in general goodness is not transitive)
 * start with smart people you already know, and then look for people who recommend/talk about this person. e.g. as of early 2020 i think it's still a reliable indicator of ''some'' quality if someone talks about wei dai unprompted. But obviously this doesn't work for more famous people like eliezer. another example is gary drescher -- very few people seem to know him/talk about him, so it is evidence of goodness if people ''do'' talk about him.
 [[Category:People watching]]

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 * this people watching stuff is probably impossible to explain, and it's not clear that it's even worth my time to attempt this. when i say someone is "good" or "bad", you sort of already need to have been in conversation with me for like one year to even understand what i mean by that. what does it mean to say that "grognor was right about everything"? etc. There is just too much to explain, and someone who reads this won't be willing to put in the effort to understand all that. i think i'm partly just writing this for myself, to organize my thoughts after all these years of PWing.
 * [[Output curve for good people]]
 ==Techniques==

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 * Most people don't even conceptualize people watching as a skill/discipline. They don't think of it as something you can improve on, where there is even an absolute scale that measures how good someone is or how good you are at figuring out how good someone is. In a specific context like software interviews, they might agree that you can interview people for a job in better and worse ways. They might even think you can improve your skills as a interviewer, and that there is a discipline of interviewing, of figuring out what works, what is a good predictor of job performance, and so on. But I think people just stop there, and don't generalize to the broader context, and ask "how can I find the smartest people, in a holistic/overall worldviews/overall ability to figure things out sense?"
 * this people watching stuff is probably impossible to explain, and it's not clear that it's even worth my time to attempt this. when i say someone is "good" or "bad", you sort of already need to have been in conversation with me for like one year to even understand what i mean by that. what does it mean to say that "grognor was right about everything"? etc. There is just too much to explain, and someone who reads this won't be willing to put in the effort to understand all that. i think i'm partly just writing this for myself, to organize my thoughts after all these years of PWing.
 ==Techniques==

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 * pay bounties to get recommendations for people (I am [https://www.facebook.com/groups/1781724435404945/permalink/2638709466373100/ currently trying this out]; i'll report back on results)
 * IRL networks -- i haven't found this as useful for finding smart people. I think it's fine for finding decent people and for finding friends/people you can trust.
 [[Category:People watching]]

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 * there aren't many good people
 * big insight of people watching: there aren't _that_ many people. if you really wanted, you could go through every single user on LW and check if they are smart or not. that will let you find all the smart people on LW. PW looks harder than it is because people aren't systematic about it.
 * there aren't many potential candidates of good people either -- so it's actually possible to map out the whole space given ~1,000 hours of work.
 * you will sometimes find that the people you eventually discover to be good are people you already encountered once or twice before and skipped over. this has happened for me with eliezer/LW in general, wei (2015 vs 2017), carl, jonathan blow (2016 vs 2020). you could maybe even count vipul too (if you count me checking groupprops when i was young and before i knew him). what does this mean? one thought is that there might be people you're missing out on that you skipped over. another is that there's actually this small core of good people, and because they're good you keep running into them (and eventually realizing how good they are). another is that there's a lot of redundancy when it comes to people watching; you don't need to get everything 100% correct on the first try -- instead, it's a long, multi-year process and you're allowed to make mistakes, you're allowed to change your mind about someone, etc.

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:03, 2 June 2020
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	'''People watching''', according to me, refers to the art/science/act of observing people, judging them, classifying them, analyzing them, finding them, etc. etc.		'''People watching''', according to me, refers to the art/science/act of observing people, judging them, classifying them, analyzing them, finding them, etc. etc.
		+
		+	TODO: say something about Dunbar's number. there's a limit to how many people you can track ''closely'', but most people are so bad that they're not worth tracking closely, so it sort of works out in the end.. you still want to get to the point where you're at least somewhat familiar with a ton of people though. a big problem that i think other people have (i.e. people who are not gung ho about people watching) is that they don't store enough people's names and what they're like, so they don't even catch connections that come up. like let's say person X mentions person Y as a cool person to check out. and then like five months later, person Z also says person Y is cool. but by that point you've forgotten that person X said this, so your "internal karma" for person Y has reset, instead of accumulating. you want to avoid this sort of thing happening. human memory sucks, etc.

	==Identifying good people==		==Identifying good people==

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 ** [[Intra-personal comparison test]]
 * It ''seems'' like there are fewer Eliezer/Wei/Carl caliber people in their 20s, compared to 15 years ago. What's going on?
 * Most people don't even conceptualize people watching as a skill/discipline. They don't think of it as something you can improve on, where there is even an absolute scale that measures how good someone is or how good you are at figuring out how good someone is. In a specific context like software interviews, they might agree that you can interview people for a job in better and worse ways. They might even think you can improve your skills as a interviewer, and that there is a discipline of interviewing, of figuring out what works, what is a good predictor of job performance, and so on. But I think people just stop there, and don't generalize to the broader context, and ask "how can I find the smartest people, in a holistic/overall worldviews/overall ability to figure things out sense?"

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 * [[Parasitizing on popularity]]
-* Using "site:*.com/about" with identity labels [https://www.facebook.com/riceissa/posts/1969878083291139]
+* Using "site:*.com/about" with identity labels [https://www.facebook.com/riceissa/posts/1969878083291139] -- i actually think i might have found anatoly karlin this way. i don't remember finding anyone else that's interesting this way.
 * there's sometimes lists like [https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1253488805618671617] but idk I've never found these super good for finding people?
 * use [[spaced repetition]] or just a plain reminder system to check back on promising people -- e.g. I have to-do items in orgmode that just say "check back on X" where X is the url of someone's site, with a short description of why i found that person promising. young people especially can't be expected to have much online presence, so waiting gives you a way to guarantee that you "discover" them later.