There are several questions I have not worked through to my satisfaction and incorporated into the models that preceded, and so I list them here.
- Who were the most Competent/Agentic folk in history, who had the most Positive Impact, and what were the key variables in allowing them to do so?
- What is the role of individuals versus groups versus institutions?
- And how do you make long lasting institutions with good epistemic practices?
- How big a variable is the social environment you’re in? Even if building institutions is unimportant, is a social environment that strongly supports self-directed work a significant variable?
- When do you stop working on skilling-up, and focus on direct work?
- What are the novel model-building and strategic heuristics used by the most agentic individuals, and how can one practice them?
- Is competence a scalar variable with many different domains of expertise, or is it multivariate with one single domain of expertise (the world)?
Brief thoughts on each of them:
- It seems on a cursory glance, that the most competent people generally have strong technical abilities in their youth, and otherwise have very novel model building heuristics. Trying to replicate a bunch of these might prove useful.
- Being able to bring the best people to you and get them to work in coordination to a single goal seems potentially a very significant ability.
- Start by learning how to build organisations in general. Look at YC's stuff.
- Probably important.
- Unknown.
- Read books by the top people, and also discuss this with other people trying to work on it too (e.g. CFAR).
- I'm currently reading IQ and Human Intelligence (2nd edition) to get a better handle on this.