[ExI] instilling ambition

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at canonizer.com
Sun Jan 20 19:35:28 UTC 2013


Good and Important moral question!

In my opinion there are multiple dimensions to ambition and getting 
things done.

Religious people tend to have a "He's got the hold world in his hands" 
(so I don't have to do anything, God will do it all for me) attitude.  
Obviously, a big killer of ambition there.  Every 0ne becomes just a 
spectator, watching and waiting for divine intervention from above, with 
zero ambition to do anything but worship and wallow in whatever that is 
- thinking God has already made everything perfect or is maybe the 
perfect plan for some "Godly ways" which we can't comprehend.

Most religions are also very hierarchical, leading to a similar "I don't 
need to think for myself, nor do I need to take any ambition, i just 
need to do what my superiors or the guy at the top, tell me to do, and 
wait for them to do it all."  This of course extends into many corporate 
systems.  I work at 3M, a very hierarchical institution, and it drives 
me crazy at how bottle necked that organization is.  Almost nobody has 
any ambition to do anything, outside of what their manager tells them to 
do.  And the organization fosters that kind of thinking.  And even if 
you do take such ambition, management tends to think you're failing, 
because your not doing 100% only what they want you to do.  In that kind 
of bottle necked management system, only the top 1 or 2 most important 
things get done, leaving everything else a miserable, terrible, never 
gets done mess, and nobody can communicate institution wide.

Another most important of all issue is large scale co-operation. This is 
where religious people blow away liberal humanistic type loners.   Even 
your question seems to ignore this.  In my opinion so many 
transhumanists have the Jules Vern type attitude so many Sci-Fi heros 
have, that they can do it all themselves, damn the rest of the world - 
let them rot in hell, for all I care.  My way or the highway.  This is 
why large church organization rule the world, while humanists are just 
seen as lonely winners and sinners, never doing anything significant at 
all, contributing to what the rest of the world is doing.

In reality, you can't do anything significant, alone.  Maybe make it 
around the world in 80 days, but big wop.  Yet, as soon as you can just 
find enough people that want the same thing you do, heaven and earth 
will move to make it happen, regardless of how motivated any of the 
millions of individuals are or aren't.

Then of course there is what should you and the crowd be motivated 
about?  Intelligent liberals, of course shine, above religious types, in 
this regard.  In fact, their moral intelligence is what makes them 
independent and liberal in the first place.  But for people not blessed 
with such great DNA/environment..., often time they are far better in a 
religion, than trying to know, for themselves, what they should be 
motivated to do.  And even the most morally intelligent person, is he, 
alone, the best possible at knowing what is right and wrong to be 
ambitiously working towards achieving?  Shold we be putting everything 
into getting to the center of the earth, or is that, for the time being 
, a big moral waste of time, while people are still heading to rotting 
in the hell that is the grave?  Wouldn't the smartest, most morally 
achieved person, do far better, on all moral decisions, if he could 
select a huge set of who he considered experts, on any particular issue, 
and then survey for what the expert consensus way to act was, on all 
important moral issues?  And also wouldn't he be far more wise if he 
could have a concise and quantitative representation of why that was, 
for reference (without having to read 20K+ peer reviewed documents on 
the subject)?  Here, large scale co-operation and diversity, also helps 
any individual be far more wise than even the most wise individual, 
alone, can be, on all important issues.

Also, religions have bread us to think it is immoral to tell anyone else 
what we want, that only what God wants is all important, and any 
deviation we have from that is "wordy", mistaken, immoral, and deserving 
of hell / excommunication / firing.  Taking this inbred programming is 
why hierarchies are still the only capable large organizations.

So, in my opinion, the most important 'ambition' is simply being 
motivated to find out and express exactly what you want to everyone.  
And to do so in a way that you can find others that agree with you, in 
an open survey consensus building way.  You also need to know, concisely 
and quantitatively, what everyone else wants, so you can be sure to not 
get in their way, especially any minority, while also seeking what you 
want with everyone else that wants the same.

Once you find enough people that want the same thing you want, heaven 
and earth will move to make it happen, regardless of how ambitious 
anyone is or isn't beyond that.  If you can know, concisely and 
quantitatively, what everyone wants, wars will cease, political debate 
will stop, and everyone will finally become very focused and ambitiously 
motivated to co-operate and get exactly that for everyone as efficiently 
and justly as possible.  And of course finding out, concisely and 
quantitatively, what everyone wants, is what the open survey system at 
Canonizer.com is all about.  And if that's not the best way to find out 
what everyone wants and believes, let's find something better.

You can't just have ambition, you need to have a vision of where that 
ambition should take not just you, but everyone.  Once you have that 
clear vision, everything else, including ambition, will just happen.

Brent Allsop



On 1/20/2013 7:26 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 19/01/2013 21:19, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>>> Any other ideas of how to instil grand ambition in people? Force them to read a bit of Rand, Nietzsche or von Braun?
>> Not sure about Rand, but Nietzsche and von Braun have been my idols
>> since age 14... :-)
>
> It would be interesting to see when great ambition is founded in life. 
> I have a suspicion that it is pretty common for kids to develop it at 
> an early age, but it would be good to analyse the necessary 
> preconditions and triggers. People have been looking at the life 
> histories of exceptional people checking for preconditions of talent 
> blossoming, but I don't know if the same thing has been done for 
> ambition. (I did not find much in PubMed, at least; see below)
>
> I have never been much for idols, but clearly reading sf at an early 
> age filled me with the idea that one *could* be amazingly ambitious - 
> the heroes of Jules Verne, the epic projects of classic hard sf, 
> finally the cosmological re-engineering of Dyson and Tipler. The key 
> thing was the realization that the universe is enormous, yet there 
> exist actions that allow you to leverage things to ever greater 
> scales. So I just set out to make myself into some kind of 
> scientist-hero able to do that, pursuing self-enhancement, learning 
> and networking. I just wish more people did that kind of attempted 
> life -shaping.
>
>
> Some relevant papers:
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22545622
> On the value of aiming high: the causes and consequences of ambition.
>
>     "Results indicated that ambition was predicted by individual
>     differences-conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and
>     general mental ability-and a socioeconomic background variable:
>     parents' occupational prestige. Ambition, in turn, was positively
>     related to educational attainment, occupation prestige, and
>     income. Ambition had significant total effects with all of the
>     endogenous variables except mortality."
>
> http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1963-03848-001
> Some family determinants of ambition.
> Again, family education and family stability seemed relevant. However, 
> I suspect the ambition they looked for were merely aiming at a 
> prestigious occupation, not changing the world.
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22180878
> Ambition gone awry: the long-term socioeconomic consequences of 
> misaligned and uncertain ambitions in adolescence.
> This one shows that having aspirations that are in line with reality 
> is helpful, at least when it comes to occupational status.
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21921915
> The evolution of overconfidence.
> This is an argument why we are all a bit overconfident on average. But 
> overconfidence is not the same as ambition.
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19070437
> Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for 
> perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and 
> creativity.
> Argues that modern science selects strongly for intelligence and 
> conscientiousness, when it should be selecting for intelligence and 
> psychoticism (the personality trait) if it wants to break new ground.
> -- 
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Faculty of Philosophy
> Oxford University
>
>
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