A fool learns from their own mistakes
The wise learn from the mistakes of others.

– Otto von Bismark

A problem as old as time: The youth won't listen to your hard-earned wisdom.

This post is about learning to listen to, and communicate wisdom. It is very long – I considered breaking it up into a sequence, but, each piece felt necessary. I recommend reading slowly and taking breaks.

To begin, here are three illustrative vignettes:

The burnt out grad student

You warn the young grad student "pace yourself, or you'll burn out." The grad student hears "pace yourself, or you'll be kinda tired and unproductive for like a week." They're excited about their work, and/or have internalized authority figures yelling at them if they aren't giving their all.

They don't pace themselves. They burn out.

The oblivious founder

The young startup/nonprofit founder [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) The burnt out grad student

(01:00) The oblivious founder

(02:13) The Thinking Physics student

(07:06) Epistemic Status

(08:23) PART I

(08:26) An Overview of Skills

(14:19) Storytelling as Proof of Concept

(15:57) Motivating Vignette:

(17:54) Having the Impossibility can be defeated trait

(21:56) If it werent impossible, well, then Id have to do it, and that would be awful.

(23:20) Example of Gaining a Tool

(23:59) Example of Changing self-conceptions

(25:24) Current Takeaways

(27:41) Fictional Evidence

(32:24) PART II

(32:27) Competitive Deliberate Practice

(33:00) Step 1: Listening, actually

(36:34) The scale of humanity, and beyond

(39:05) Competitive Spirit

(39:39) Is your cleverness going to help more than Whatever That Other Guy Is Doing?

(41:00) Distaste for the Competitive Aesthetic

(42:40) Building your own feedback-loop, when the feedback-loop is can you beat Ruby?

(43:43) ...back to George

(44:39) Mature Games as Excellent Deliberate Practice Venue.

(46:08) Deliberate Practice qua Deliberate Practice

(47:41) Feedback loops at the second-to-second level

(49:03) Oracles, and Fully Taking The Update

(49:51) But what do you do differently?

(50:58) Magnitude, Depth, and Fully Taking the Update

(53:10) Is there a simple, general skill of appreciating magnitude?

(56:37) PART III

(56:52) Tacit Soulful Trauma

(58:32) Cults, Manipulation and/or Lying

(01:01:22) Sandboxing: Safely Importing Beliefs

(01:04:07) Asking what does Alice believe, and why? or what is this model claiming? rather than what seems true to me?

(01:04:43) Pre-Grieving (or leaving a line of retreat)

(01:05:47) EPILOGUE

(01:06:06) The Practical

(01:06:09) Learning to listen

(01:10:58) The Longterm Direction

The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 4 images which were described by AI.

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First published:
December 9th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFj7C6NNc8GPdfNo/subskills-of-listening-to-wisdom

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Narrated by

Apostolic Gratitude - Colossians 1:12-14 - Aaron Wright