Musings on Teaching Agency
Having now observed and taught a handful of classes on “agency”, whatever that means, I found it helpful to collect my thoughts on it and teaching it (and resources I found helpful).
Agency is a massively clustered concept
I found it very helpful to figure out which of the below I was trying to convey and which I wasn’t. They don’t all together fit in one hour, may of them can easily take an hour by themselves
You don’t need permission to try and do things
If you see an opportunity, take it
There aren’t grownups in the room who will just fix things if you don’t
(It is very hard to be a ‘hero’ in the face of social penalties)
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
― Jerry Garcia
in theory, everything is your responsibility, maybe even your fault if it goes wrong
Civilizational Inadequacy
The empirical claim that there is low-hanging fruit, that when things don’t work it’s sometimes because no one has really tried, or tried the right things
Actually trying
Note: this has terrible politics
Having goals and caring about them
Caring about what you’re trying to protect
Aiming directly at the thing
Not trying to try
Especially to appease an external or internal (or imagined) critic who wants you to have “done enough”
Determination and Resolve
What’s stopping you
Thinking through your goals and bottlenecks
Breaking down goals into smaller pieces
Taking everything as a problem to be solved
Thinking about what resources you have
Upside bargains
Some stuff is a little scary or seems weird to others but has few actual costs - do them!
Think through what’s actually costly about things that feel off the table
Expansion of option set
Babble/brainstorm for five minutes on all the things you could do / ways to solve your problems
Consider all the things you’re allowed to do
Initiative taking
A bias towards action
Fixing problems now rather than letting them fester
Seeing all things as problems to be solved
Ambition
Raising aspirations
Learning how to think bigger
Acting on the world
The world is different because you’re in it
You act on the world and shape it to be what you want, don’t just let it act on you
What are possible goals of a class on agency?
Similarly, I’ve found it helpful to know what I’m trying to do and what I’m not trying to do
Teach concrete skills like resolve cycles or goal factoring
Teach the *feeling* of actually trying by talking about it, bringing up relevant examples in the world and in participant’s lives, practicing via things like resolve cycles
Convey these concepts so they’re handles in participants’ lives
Become a shoulder person for them, part of their mental parliament, being a presence in their mental lives that, when relevant shouts “why not you!” or “go for it!” or whatever’s appropriate
This is usually best done by being pretty intense and/or animated about the idea
Emotional stances that lend themselves to this:
Earnest admiration of people who have just Done The Thing
Serious frustration at the lack of it in the world, the places where there are no grownups
You can also explicitly say this is your goal
Creating a culture or common knowledge that some space or community is an “Agency Space” or values this
Follow up / actually making it part of your culture is going to be likely needed, over and above a class
The kinds of things you might want to model if you’re trying to do this
Some things to be aware of:
I think agency is unusually easy to teach / grow / encourage from baseline relative to things like judgment and thoughtfulness
That said, extremely high amounts of it remain quite rare
Emphasizing social agency disproportionately to “Getting Things Done Yourself” agency
The most obvious upside bargains are asking people for favors or writing cold emails
These can be great; they can also in excess engender helplessness, burn social capital and steamroll over cooperativeness. In EA / rationality [and other professional spaces, perhaps more so in worlds where you’re expected to act more normally], the latter two are quite costly
How to teach about imposing costs on others
My frame has been to think of e.g. EA as an agent where I value its time at a certain amount relative to mine and ask for favors / time appropriately to that
There are skills associated with how to ask for time and favors in a way that lowers the cost to saying no [learning those skills is itself a cost]
“Agency” can be used to row or steer, you have to know how to figure out which you should be doing
In general, how to have actually good goals is not a standard part of agency talks
In my experience, what goals to have and what values one has is a huge uncertainty in young (and not so young) people
I like to flag that this ideally lives in a cluster (either in one person or in a community) with certain kinds of humility, wisdom, and judgment, which seem harder to teach
Chesterton’s Fence
