Note: I'm crossposting this because I often find myself referring to it in conversation. I often hear ideas or proposals that fail to account for the surprising amount of detail reality contains. Some of my own ideas and proposals fail for the same reason.

While the stereotype of people in EA as head-in-the-clouds philosophers doesn't fit most people I've met in the movement, we should still recognize those tendencies in ourselves when they arise, and remember how small details can multiply or reverse the impact we expect to have.

(Put another way, I think of this post as a clear introduction to crucial considerations.)

My favorite lines:

You might hope that these surprising details are irrelevant to your mission, but not so. Some of them will end up being key.
[...]
You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.
[...]
Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

The post

I.

My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings we owned.

That’s how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years replacing fences, digging trenches, and building flooring and sheds. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail.

This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they’re literally the best in the world in their field.

Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amou...

Crucial consideration

Further reading