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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Useful Vices for Wicked Problems, published by Holden Karnofsky on April 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cross-posted from Cold Takes. I've claimed that the best way to learn is by writing about important topics. (Examples I've worked on include: which charity to donate to, whether life has gotten better over time, whether civilization is declining, whether AI could make this the most important century of all time for humanity.) But I've also said this can be "hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet," because: When trying to write about these sorts of topics, I often find myself needing to constantly revise my goals, and there's no clear way to know whether I'm making progress. That is: trying to write about a topic that I'm learning about is generally a wicked problem. I constantly find myself in situations like "I was trying to write up why I think X, but I realized that X isn't quite right, and now I don't know what to write." and "I either have to write something obvious and useless or look into a million more things to write something interesting." and "I'm a week past my self-imposed deadline, and it feels like I have a week to go, but maybe it's actually 12 weeks - that's what happened last time." Overall, this is the kind of work where I can't seem to tell how progress is going, or stay on a schedule. This post goes through some tips I've collected over the years for dealing with these sorts of challenges - both working on them myself, and working with teammates and seeing what works for them. A lot of what matters for doing this sort of work is coming at it with open-mindedness, self-criticality, attention to detail, and other virtues. But a running theme of this work is that it can be deadly to approach with too much virtue: holding oneself to self-imposed deadlines, trying for too much rigor on every subtopic, and otherwise trying to do "Do everything right, as planned and on time" can drive a person nuts. So this post is focused on a less obvious aspect of what helps with wicked problems, which is useful vices - antidotes to the kind of thoroughness and conscientiousness that lead to unreachable standards, and make wicked problems impossible. I've organized my tips under the following vices, borrowing from Larry Wall and extending his framework a bit: Laziness. When some key question is hard to resolve, often the best move is to just ... not resolve it, and change the thesis of your writeup instead (and change how rigorous you're trying to make it). For example, switching from "These are the best charities" to "These are the charities that are best by the following imperfect criteria." Impatience. One of the most crucial tools for this sort of work is interrupting oneself. I could be reading through study after study on some charitable activity (like building wells), when stepping back to ask "Wait, why does this matter for the larger goal again?" could be what I most need to do. Hubris. Whatever I was originally arguing ("Charity X is the best"), I'm probably going to realize at some point that I can't actually defend it. This can be demoralizing, even crisis-inducing. I recommend trying to build an unshakable conviction that one has something useful to say, even when one has completely lost track of what that something might be. Self-preservation. When you're falling behind, it can be tempting to make a "heroic" effort at superhuman productivity. When a problem seems impossible, it can be tempting to fix your steely gaze on it and DO IT ANYWAY. I recommend the opposite: instead of rising to the challenge, shrink from it and fight another day (when you'll solve some problem other than the one you thought you were going for). Overall, it's tempting to try to "boil the ocean" and thoroughly examine every aspect of a topic o...