How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire
This is based on a concept we developed at the Vancouver Rationalists meetup.
Different experiences level a person up at different rates. You could work some boring job all your life and be 60 and not be much more awesome than your average teenager. On the other hand, some people have such varied and so much life experience that by 30 they are as awesome as a 1000 year old vampire.
This reminds me that it’s possible to conduct your life with more or less efficiency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Further, while we don’t have actual life extension, it’s content we care about, not run time. If you can change your habits such that you get 3 times as much done, that’s like tripling your effective lifespan.
So how might one get a 100x speedup and become like a 1000 year old vampire in 10 years? This is absurdly ambitious, but we can try:
Do Hard Things
Some experiences catapult you forward in personal development. You can probably systematically collect these to build formidability as fast as possible.
Paul Graham says that many of the founders he sees (as head of YC) become much more awesome very quickly as need forces them to. This seems plausible and it seems back up by other sources as well. Basically “learn to swim by jumping in the deep end”; people have a tendency to take the easy way that results in less development when given the chance, so the chance to slack off being removed can be beneficial.
That has definitely been my personal experience as well. At work, the head engineer got brain cancer and I got de-facto promoted to head of two of the projects, which I then leveled up to be able to do. It felt pretty scary at first, but now I’m bored and wishing something further would challenge me. (addendum: not bored right now at all; crazy crunch time for the other team, which which I am helping) It seems really hard to just do better without such forcing; as far as I can tell I could work much harder than now, but willpower basically doesn’t exist so I don’t.
On that note, a friend of mine got big results from joining the Army and getting tear gassed in a trench while wet, cold, exhausted, sleep deprived, and hungry, which pushed him through stuff he wouldn’t have thought he could deal with. Apparently it sortof re-calibrated his feelings about how well he should be doing and how hard things are such that he is now a millionaire and awesome.
So the mechanism behind a lot of this seems to be recalibrating what seems hard or scary or beyond your normal sphere. I used to be afraid of phone calls and doing weird stuff like climbing trees in front of strangers, but not so much anymore; it feels like I just forget that they were scary. In the case of the phone there were a few times where I didn’t have time to be scared, I needed to just get things done. In the case of climbing trees, I did it on my own enough for it to become normalized so that it didn’t even come up that people would see me, because it didn’t seem weird.
So tying that back in, there are experiences that you can put yourself into to force that normalization and acclimatization to hard stuff. For example, some people do this thing called “Rejection Therapy” or “Comfort Zone Expansion”, basically going out and doing embarrassing or scary things deliberately to recalibrate your intuitions and teach your brain that they are not so scary.
On the failure end, self-improvement projects tend to fail when they require constant application of willpower. It’s just a fact that you will fall off the wagon on those things. So you have to make it impossible to fall off the wagon. You have to make it scarier to fall off the wagon than it is to level up and just do it. This is the idea behind Beeminder, which takes your money if you don’t do what your last-week self said you would.
I guess the thesis behind all this is that these level-ups are permanent, in that they make you more like a 1000 year old vampire, and you don’t just go back to being your boring old mortal self. If this is true, the implication that you should seek out hard stuff seems pretty interesting and important.
Broadness of Experience
Think of a 1000 year old vampire; they would have done everything. Fought in battles, led armies, built great works, been in love, been everywhere, observed most aspects of the human experience, and generally seen it all.
Things you can do have sharply diminishing returns; the first few times you watch great movies is most of the benefit thereof, likewise with video games, 4chan, most jobs, and most experiences in general. Thus it’s really important to switch around the things you do a lot so that you stay in that sharp initially growing part of the learning curve. You can get 90% of the vampire’s experience with 10% of his time investment if you focus on those most enlightening parts of each experience.
So besides doing hard things that level you up, you can get big gains by doing many things and switching as soon as you get bored (which is hopefully calibrated to how challenged you are).
You may remember early in the Arabian revolutions in Libya, an American student took the summer off college to fight in the revolution. I bet he learned a lot. If you could do enough things like that, you’d be well on your way to matching the vampire.
This actually goes hand in hand with doing hard things; when you’re not feeling challenged (you’re on the flat part of that experience curve), its probably best to throw yourself face first into some new project, both because it’s new, and because it’s hard.
Switching often has the additional benefit of normalizing strategic changes and practicing “what should I be doing”-type thoughts, which can’t hurt if you intend to actually do useful stuff with your life.
There are probably many cases where full on switching is not best. For example, you don’t become an expert in X by switching out of X as soon as you know the basics. It might be that you want to switch often on side-things but go deep on X. Alternatively, you probably want to do some kind of switch every now and then in X, maybe look at things from a different perspective, tackle a different problem, or something like that. This is the Deliberate Practice theory of expertise.
So don’t forget the shape of that experience curve. As soon as you start to feel that leveling off, find a way to make it fresh again.
Do Things Quickly
Another big angle on this idea is that every hour is an opportunity, and you want to make the best of them. This seems totally obvious but I definitely “get it” a lot more having thought about it in terms of becoming a 1000 year old vampire.
A big example is procrastination. I have a lot of things that have been hanging around on my todo list for a long time, basically oppressing me by their presence. I can’t relax and look to new things to do while there’s still that one stupid thing on my todo list. The key insight is that if you process the stuff on your todo list now instead of slacking now and doing it later, you get it out of the way and then you can do something else later, and thereby become a 1000 year old vampire faster.
So a friend and I have internalized this a bit more and started really noticing those opportunity costs, and actually started knocking things off faster. I’m sure there’s more where that came from; we are nowhere near optimal in Doing It Now, so it’s probably good to meditate on this more.
As a concrete example, I’m writing tonight because I realized that I need to just get all my writing ideas out of the way to make room for more awesomeness.
The flipside of this idea is that a lot of things are complete wastes of time, in the sense that they just burn up lifespan and don’t get you anything, or even weaken you.
Bad habits like reading crap on the Internet, watching TV, watching porn, playing video games, sleeping in, and so on are obvious losses. It’s really hard to internalize that, but this 1000-year-old-vampire concept has been helpful for me by making the magnitude of the cost more salient. Do you want to wake up when you’re 30 and realize you wasted your youth on meaningless crap, or do you want to get off your ass and write that thing you’ve been meaning to right now, and be a fscking vampire in 10 years?
It’s not just bad habits, though; a lot of it is your broader position in life that wastes time or doesn’t. For example, repetitive wage work that doesn’t challenge you is really just trading a huge chunk of your life for not even much money. Obviously sometimes you have to, but you have to realize that trading away half your life is a pretty raw deal that is to be avoided. You don’t even really get anything for commuting and housework. Maybe I really should quit my job soon...
I have 168 hours a week, of which only 110 are feasible to use (sleep), and by the time we include all the chores, wage-work, bad habits, and procrastination, I probably only live 30 hours a week. That’s bullshit; three quarters of my life pissed away. I could live four times as much if I could cut out that stuff.
So this is just the concept of time opportunity costs dressed up to be more salient. Basic economics concepts seem really quite valuable in this way.
Do it now so you can do something else later. Avoid crap work.
Social Environment and Stimulation
I notice that I’m most alive and do my best intellectual work when talking to other people who are smart and interested in having deep technical conversations. Other things like certain patterns of time pressure create this effect where I work many times harder and more effectively than otherwise. A great example is technical exams; I can blast out answers to hundreds of technical questions at quite a rate.
It seems like a good idea to induce this state where you are more alive (is it the “flow” state?) if you want to live more life. It also seems totally possible to do so more often by hanging out with the right people and exposing yourself to the right working conditions and whatnot.
One thing that will come up is that it’s quite draining, in that I sometimes feel exhausted and can’t get much done after a day of more intense work. Is this a real thing? Probably. Still, I’m nowhere near the limit even given the need to rest, in general.
I ought to do some research to learn more about this. If it’s connected to “flow”, there’s been a lot of research, AFAIK.
I also ought to just hurry up and move to California where there is a proper intellectual community that will stimulate me much better than the meager group of brains I could scrape together in Vancouver.
The other benefit of a good intellectual community is that they can incentivize doing cooler things. When all your friends are starting companies or otherwise doing great work, sitting around on the couch feels like a really bad idea.
So if we want to live more life, finding more ways to enter that stimulated flow state seems like a prudent thing to do, whether that means just making way for it in your work habits, putting yourself in more challenging social and intellectual environments, or whatever.
Adding It Up
So how fast can we go overall if we do all of this?
By seeking many new experiences to keep learning, I think we can plausibly get 10x speedup over what you might do by default. Obviously this can be more or less, based on circumstances and things I’m not thinking of.
On top of that, it seems like I could do 4x as much by maintaining a habit of doing it now and avoiding crap work. How to do this, I don’t know, but it’s possible.
I don’t know how to estimate the actual gains from a stimulating environment. It seems like it could be really really high, or just another incremental gain in efficiency, depending how it goes down. Let’s say that on top of the other things, we can realistically push ourselves 2x or 3x harder by social and environmental effects.
Doing hard things seems huge, but also quite related to the doing new things angle that we already accounted for. So explicitly remembering to do hard things on top of that? Maybe 5x? This again will vary a lot based on what opportunities you are able to find, and unknown factors, but 5x seems safe enough given mortal levels of ingenuity and willpower.
So all together, someone who:
-
Often thinks about where they are on the experience curve for everything they do, and takes action on that when appropriate,
-
Maintains a habit of doing stuff now and visualizing those opportunity costs,
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Puts themselves in a stimulating environment like the bay area intellectual community and surrounds themselves with stimulating people and events,
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Seeks out the hardest character-building experiences like getting tear gassed in a trench or building a company from scratch,
Can plausibly get 500x speedup and live 1000 normal years in 2. That seems pretty wild, but none of these things are particularly out there, and people like Elon Musk or Eliezer Yudkowsky do seem to do around that magnitude more than the average joe.
Perhaps they don’t multiply quite that conveniently, or there’s some other gotcha, but the target seems reachable, and these things will help. On the other hand, they almost certainly self-reinforce; a 1000 year old vampire would have mastered the art of living life life at ever higher efficiencies.
This does seem to be congruent with all this stuff being power-law distributed, which of course makes it difficult to summarize by a single number like 500.
The final question of course is what real speedup we can expect you or I to gain from writing or reading this. Getting more than 2 or 3 times by having a low-level insight or reading a blog post seems stretching of the imagination, never mind 500 times. But still, power laws happen. There’s probably massive payoff to taking this idea seriously.
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An interesting post. Two directions for more thinking:
(1) Goals. What do you want to get out of this? What do you really want? Doing lots of things quickly and intensely is one way to describe a rat race. Yes, you can run faster but where are you running to?
(2) Risks. There is a certain aura of invincibility surrounding this post. But do remember that shit happens and vampires happen to be already dead and quite hard to kill (again). You have to make sure that your broad intense experiences aren’t putting you into running for the Darwin Award. That American student who fought in Libya—what were his chances of coming home in a body bag? or coming back with severe PTSD and becoming emotionally disabled?
Good question. This thing has a lot of opportunity for lost purposes. My particular goal is get enough power to save the world, which does sometimes disagree with maximum vampire-mode. They often agree though, and the vampire heuristic pushes harder than the save-the-world goal, because vanity metrics like “how vampire-mode are you” are more motivating than important things like saving the world.
Another good point. Let’s not be stupid and get killed. I for one would think that it is probably not a good idea to go fight in a revolution or other dangerous activities, but I put it in anyway because it was a good example.
Maybe instead of thinking in 1000-year-old vampire terms for this, it’s better to think in intelligence explosion terms. For example, let’s say you have a list of goals you want to accomplish. One is get more sleep, which you expect, among other things, to improve your focus. Another is meditate intensely for 10 minutes every day, which you expect, among other things, to improve your willpower. Each of these goals helps to some degree with the other. If you had a lot of goals that all improved your capacity to work towards the other goals, and improved your capacity in general, then you could potentially see exponential growth in your ability to do things. (Some of your goals should probably be object-level though, because it’s good to intermix self-improvement goals with object-level goals to see if you are actually building the kind of capacities you need.)
But lets say that you’ve tried and failed at both the meditation and sleep goals in the past. In that case, you are having a hard time getting the exponential growth cycle started, and you’re probably better off taking things from another angle, kind of like a game of sudoku. So develop and test a hypothesis about why your meditation goal failed, or read up on strategies people have to overcome whatever problem you think you were having. Or alternatively, try to find the small capacity-building thing that you think is quite likely to stick for the long term, and try to achieve it so you can gain a toehold. Then celebrate and attempt the capacity-building thing that you think is the next hardest to get to stick, etc. This also doubles as establishing a success spiral and builds the ability to maintain commitments to yourself (and is also kaizen).
Probably the easiest sort of “toehold” to establish is just to start learning more about yourself. Read up on ugh fields, reinforcement, and stuff like it. Maybe spill your guts to a friend, or start keeping a productivity diary… every entry you make has a small expected self-knowledge gain. Basically try to get as much insight as you can in to yourself, because self-knowledge is an irreversible capacity gain (unlike, say, a habit, which, once lost, will have to be re-established).
(I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s wondered if the effective altruist community is best off overtly telling everyone we are focused on things like Givewell, MIRI, etc. but covertly choosing to focus most of our resources on capacity-building, knowing that the goals we’ve set for ourselves are big enough that they aren’t going to be realistically accomplished with our current cohort.)
I don’t think deception is even necessary here. Leverage Research is basically openly telling people they’re focused on capacity building and making humans smarter & more capable, and CFAR seems to be doing the same thing from a different angle.
I’m advocating deception in the sense of not telling people that a possible majority of the resources in the EA movement are devoted to expanding the EA movement, at least not right off. I think it’s fine that Leverage and CFAR are upfront about their mission.
Let us recall the maxim about people advocating big lies on the internet, the suitability of said people for propagating said lies, and their likelihood of success.
Back when I was trying to quit cigarettes I had many different types of motivation to get me to stick with not smoking. Money, health, and dating were all reasons for me to quit, and they didn’t work until I found a way of thinking about it that just clicked for me – I didn’t want to be ‘that guy’, that low status loser who couldn’t stop smoking, someone that just didn’t have it in him to quit. So I quit.
I really liked this post because much like when I was trying to quit cigarettes, it’s giving me a different way of thinking about my procrastination that might really click with me. This is a new insight; I want to get things done now and faster, so that I can make room for being fucking awesome!
Fuck yeah! Let’s get off our asses and become 1000 year old vampires.
Glad to know it clicks for you.
Step 1: die.
Step 2: come back to life.
This article makes some great point, however I think you are other optimizing. Specifically, these seem more like techniques for Unlocking Massive Latent Potential (that most people don’t have), or curing lazy/spoiled but already awesome people. That’s very much worth writing an article over, since those are probably where most potential rationalists will come from, but it’s not the same as an universal formula for awesomeness.
That wouldn’t be a problem—social/environmental stimulation and diversity of experience are good for you even if it doesn’t turn you into a badass. However, many of the techniques are dangerous if tried by a median human; getting rid of de-stressing activities and entertainment or taking on more responsibilities or than you can handle can burn you out, doing hard things and overloading yourself risks downright trauma and injury, and other hard things or quitting your job could leave someone in permanent financial ruin and unemployment.
What I suspect has happened here is the same type of selection effect as in books on how to get rich by extremely rich people—just because almost all members of desirable group X did Y, doesn’t mean doing Y is a good idea; you never heard of all the many more people that did Y and failed ending up in a much worse position than if they had just stuck with status quo. Being member of an elite doesn’t just select for strategy it also selects heavily for talent and luck, and different strategies may be optimal depending on the amount of talent and luck you have.
Ha, it is not until very recently that people have accused me of Latent Destiny.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that most people who have Latent Destiny do not believe that they do, and never achieve greatness because of that. People like that need to know that it’s possible, and need some inspiration like OP.
As for everyone else, humans are pretty robust and will at least exercise basic judgement before doing stupid life-wrecking things based on a bad reading of an internet article written by someone called Nyan Sandwich. And if they don’t exercise such judgement, someone else’s dangerous advice would get them if mine did not.
But that’s beside the point, because a few medians (perfect word for them, thank you) is an easy price to pay for another hero. If dangerous advice is necessary to create heroes, such dangerous advice is good, because we need more heroes, and we are at a point in history where the instrumental value of people dominates the intrinsic.
The selection effect comment is interesting, probably some truth. I’ll think about that.
You are almost certainly right about this not working for everyone. Still, applied well it could produce gains in most.
On your view, has this ever been false? If we can justify treating people as means rather than ends now, I can’t imagine a time when we couldn’t justify it.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, the overwhelming value of historically existing humans is in enabling our glorious future, and this has always been true so far.
(Not to understate the awesomeness produced so far, just that so much more is possible)
At least, that’s, like, my opinion, man.
OK, cool.
And sure, I was just making sure I understood your position; your emphasis on the point we are in history left me uncertain whether there was some other point where it wasn’t true.
I now feel compelled to add that to the extent that I expect you to act accordingly I will avoid you having power over anyone I care about, as I distrust the willingness to sacrifice existing people in order to enable a vision of our glorious future. That sort of thing has an iffy hit rate with humans; we tend to be overconfident about our specific details of our visions of glorious futures.
Oh. Yea that’s obvious hindsight. Looks like a got so carried away making a clever point that I forgot to be consequentialist. Again.
Is this because of the (presumed) looming AI x-risk or something?
Yes there’s that. There’s also the positive side; we have not won yet.
(We’ve won when the universe has been torn apart and rebuilt for our benefit, or a powerful and reliable process that doesn’t need human help is doing so. At that point we can focus on living valuable lives as people. For now we have to focus on being agents; steering the future towards that win.)
Hmm, by “we” I assume that you mean “transhumansts”? Or some subset of them?
I am in general dubious about “post-singularity utopias”, as Moss_Piglet put it. I am all for rebuilding the universe, once “we” know what “we” are doing, but I am skeptical that it will, say, put an end to all suffering, or achieve some similarly sweeping goals. It just pattern matches too closely to every end-of-the-world myth ever. But that’s a different discussion, maybe during some meetup.
“We” is an elaborate ruse to sugar coat the fact that I really mean “I”.
It is annoying when people pose obviously bad solutions and then use that to argue against trying to solve anything. You may not mean that, but it would help the rest of us if serious critics would carefully distinguish themselves from crackpots.
One of our meetups should be a workshop on the limits and potential of post-singularity superintelligence, so that we can work out ambiguities on whether such things are possible.
That is of course totally concerning. I don’t know what to do about it.
There’s a meetup every weekend, you know. We tend to have good discussions recently.
Whenever I read people talking about post-singularity utopias it makes me really glad I’ll probably die before they can be brought to fruition.
Can you actually imagine life where innate talent and learned skill had no value outside of social posturing or self-gratification? Where a Godlike machine secretly planned out your life according to some formula of ideal living? Where no-one suffered or died at all unless they chose to and real power is essentially non-existent? Where you’ll be, in all likelihood, locked into a computer simulation while the real world is being torn apart for materials to increase your jailer’s intelligence and extend its lifespan?
Even Hanson’s cockroach-topia sounds better than that.
In case you are simply making a mistake: If we win, it is hardly likely that we would build something that sucked that much. The scenario you describe is not winning, and not what anyone actually wants.
How about a world where random things that you could do nothing about did not just kill you. Where hard work and learning actually could push you as far as you wanted to go. etc.
Read the Fun Theory Sequence
I did that several years before I joined, actually. Although obviously we’ve taken away different things from it.
That’s actually the problem though; the ‘unfairness’ of chance destruction and the hard limits which no individual can transcend in a lifetime are exactly the sorts of things which I find valuable. In my view, “[h]ard work pushing you” is not a choice any more than there’s a choice between eating and starvation; those who strive will extend their will into the future while those who don’t will be annihilated and forgotten. If there are safeties to turn off, a door to get out of or a 100% completion “Golden Ending” available then it’s not life but a game. I’d like to see humanity grow up and stop playing around with games, on a metaphorical level anyway.
I know that this is not a mainstream view and that few would choose to live in my personal utopia, but on the flip side why should I change my aesthetics just because they’d lose in a headcount?
Those who strive can also be annihilated and forgotten, and those who don’t can extend their will into the future given sufficiently fortuitous starting conditions.
If that’s also part of a utopia you’d desire, so be it, but there are no points for pretending the chance destruction of our reality is fairer than it is.
Because your aesthetics are evil, possibly self-contradictory as a result, and sound ill-informed. (Picture from here, if the first link doesn’t work).
Trigger warning: The parent comment links to a photograph of a screaming child covered in blood.
For the down-voters:
Thanks for the pic, but I’m curious as to why you thought an ‘evil’ person would be bothered by it.
Edit: Actually, while I’ve got you here, can you let me know where I’ve been contradictory? I’d like to fix that sort of thing going forward.
The part that puzzles me most is the way you admit the existence of “chance destruction” before claiming “those who strive will extend their will into the future”. In the real world, looks like 5.5 million children die annually between the ages of 4 weeks and 5 years. I picked that range because I’d expect many of them to try forming models of the world and optimizing it as best they can, before the world unceremoniously deletes them.
Like I said, I don’t think you’re evil. I think you espoused an evil position or preference, which may well contradict other and more real preferences. I think you’re looking at a ridiculously small sliver of the real world and using that to conclude that the status quo is fine. (Or you’re pattern-matching wildly, which has now grown in probability.)
Now that you’ve brought this word into the conversation, would you care to define “evil”?
No I would not.
I think you meant to link to this page, but I’m still not sure how either relates to the question.
Maybe we can taboo ‘evil’ and replace it with something like “immoral within ′ to get a firmer sense of your specific objection.
If I haven’t already said enough, then it looks like one of the following holds:
You have effectively no empathy and I don’t want you to model me accurately.
You share my basic goals, but believe we can’t do much better at achieving them. Your earlier strawman really indicated that you see us as foolish dreamers.
Either way, further talk of morality seems counter-productive.
The difference between “evil” and “immoral within ” is that evil must be fought with and eradicated, if necessary without taking prisoners and leaving scorched earth behind. Now, “immoral”, that we can talk about, is it cool and sexy?
See Yvain on how certain ‘dystopias’ only look like ones from a First World person perspective.
That’s one way to look at it; another is to question the unspoken assumption that everyone’s needs deserve equal treatment. Human beings are variable on every measurable dimension, most at least partially heritable, so why not the moral dimension as well?
The fact is, as Yvain elegantly puts it, we really don’t care about the vast majority people except in the abstract and quite a bit of that professed empathy is just a result of trying to sound like a ‘good person’ in a society obsessed with the wellbeing of its underclasses. So if our self-actualization (and that of our in-groups) is already more important to us than the hunger of distant people… why not stop following a moral code we don’t even really believe in and create new values which better match our natures?
(Also, is it just me or is the hyperbolic use of ‘verboten’ incredibly annoying when you know the ‘vee’ is actually a ‘fow’ and thus the German and English words are virtually indistinguishable when spoken?)
Well said. This is true.
You mean like this?
I totally agree that utilitarianism is overhyped nonsense, and true values are much more selfish and unsympathetic. That said, given massive power, I think a non-significant fraction of my resources would go to public works projects and not just my throne.
Exactly; just because you create your own values and live by them doesn’t mean you have to stop helping your neighbor cross the street, or mandate that you start turning cherry blossom trees into biodiesel to power your strip-mining robots. It just means that you have defined your own preferences and aesthetics and act on that knowledge. “Don’t make a future too ugly for you to enjoy it” is as good a maxim as any.
I really like the “maximize awesomeness” idea BTW. It’s very catchy and cuts away a lot of the fat of the issue.
Unless I’m way out of whack with German pronunciation, the stressed vowel in verboten doesn’t sound anything like that in forbidden.
Verboten v Forbidden
Personally I hear fer-boat-in and fer-bid-in as similar enough that if someone on the street said the former I’d assume they meant the latter and never think twice about it. But even if you’d hear the difference more acutely, I don’t think either of us would think ‘Gestapo!’ the way we would seeing it spelled out.
Edit: Oops, I used lmgtfy instead of tinyurl. Sorry, that was a bookmarks issue not condescension.
Consider incorporating Nisan’s trigger warning into your post.
… as opposed to … helping other people?
I’m having trouble seeing the downsides to that. Oh, is “some formula” supposed to imply it’s arbitrary and false?
I don’t even know what you mean by this one.
“Locked”?
But, to be fair, plenty of people don’t like the idea of living in a simulation. Probably didn’t play enough videogames as kids : P
… but seriously, folks, if this turns out to be an issue, you don’t have to keep posthumanity in simulations. Many people assume we wont. It’s just easier to simulate awesome things than build them, that’s all.
OK, that’s a really excellent name for it. Upvoting just for that.
Pretty sure I’m there already.
Sounds comforting.
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Hmm. If I could only gain happiness from having power over others, I would be forced to consider myself as evil. That aside, in these post-singularity utopias I could have an arrangement with other people where we took turns, or gambled. Or I could lord it over a nation of entities that looked and acted like humans but weren’t really.
Is that a better deal for me personally? Depends on whether I’m powerful at the moment. But it’s certainly an improvement for people on average.
Agreed that this is bad. Post-singularity utopian AI should not do this.
Hire a different world-builder, then. :)
Can you state clearly what’s wrong with the world you describe… that is, what you would prefer instead?
If not, do you think someone much smarter than you might be able to state it clearly?
Either way… why not assume a world like that, instead?
For my own part, the things you describe don’t sound particularly bad, weighted language notwithstanding.
They’re certainly better than what we currently live with.
I think it might make more sense to just believe that Latent Destiny isn’t real.
This seems very dubious.
It seems pretty clearly real to me. (Where “Latent Destiny” is some set of characteristics observable in advance of greatness that are necessary for greatness, and not widely seen outside of great people) Can you expand on why you think it is not real?
Or do you just mean that it’s best to act as if it’s not real? If so, that implies that the optimal decision for people without Latent Destiny is the same as for those with it. Why would that be?
It isn’t clear to me that we’re at a point in history where heroes are unusually needed, so I’m not particularly in favor of prescribing dangerous advice to people in the hopes of producing more heroes.
As for “Latent Destiny,” it seems acquired to me.
Is this because of the (potential) looming AI x-risk or something?
I like this post, and I feel it is a great demonstration of how optimality as a motivator basically sucks without an emotionally engaging picture/narrative to tie it to. For the longest time I failed to get that the ancient marketing wisdom of “tell a story people want to be a part of” works just as well on yourself as others.
Totally. It’s important to beat these ideas into a shape consumable by a human. I’ve been thinking about doing this with “Epistemology for Humans”. Perhaps I will.
Objection: I like all of these things. Well, except watching TV. Calvin said it best: “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”
But I actually like the goal of becoming (the equivalent of) a thousand-year-old vampire, too. And there’s not enough time for that, either. That is, ultimately, what convinced me that death is bad and life extension is good: There’s not enough time to do life right. Doing it right, at least for me, means both becoming awesome and sleeping in when I feel like it.
If your field of expertise pays, you can level up while still getting paid by changing jobs regularly. I am not sure how often “regularly” should be, but I noticed a huge boost in my own skills the last couple times I started a new job in my field, followed by eventually getting bored and leveling off. Assuming you’re following a normal career, you can’t change too often or getting the next job will become hard; but if you’re bored, complacent, and inert, it’s probably time to move on.
[Edit: is Noticing Boredom a recognized mental skill? Because it should be.]
Full disclosure: I’m in the process of trying to do exactly this now. Note to six-month future self: Reflect on whether I actually did experience a similar skills boost after switching.
Amen.
Also, on the topic of social environment, here is the obligatory plug for the Less Wrong Study Hall. If you’re outside the Bay Area and have no one to work with, come work with us. We have cookies. (cookies may be a lie)
Very much agreed. When I started taking online courses I was surprised at how speeding up the video helped my learning. What was happening before, and what still happens when I’m watching slow, informationally dilute speeches, is my mind can’t sync up with the presentation and it wanders off on its own way so frequently that I simply can’t stop it from happening. I also didn’t used to realize how hanging around with crowds who wern’t curious and wern’t agenty in the same way I was sucked the life out of me. I thought I was just an inattentive, generally disengaged person. I was dead wrong.
I feel like I am an inattentive, disenganged person, and nonagenty people do suck the life out of me. What changed in your case which made you see things differently?
Howdy FourFire. At some point after conceiving of a particularly lofty particularly involving plot[details available on request for LWers], I stopped trying to befriend people who wouldn’t feature anywhere in it. Whoever I’m with, there’s always an objective, though I’ll often have to pretend there isn’t and come at it sideways, which only makes it more fun.
For me there are two kinds of people, people I can do something with, and people I’ve got nothing to do with.
Good point. I like all of these things as well, except that I have no time for hedonism. So much to do! So little time! As you observe.
So if you are basically a Sensate, seeking to experience everything in the multiverse, then (good) Internet articles, books, TV and video games are like memory stones: objects containing the experiences of others, which allow you to experience something that you might never be able to experience yourself.
It’s a trade-off. Media provides alternate experiences much faster than you could do them yourself, but also at a more shallow level. There’s a case to be made for alternating between both: once you have viscerally experienced something yourself, reading about something related may make for a stronger experience, since it activates more memories and associations in you and allows you to better simulate the original experience behind the account. At the same time, having experienced second-hands accounts of something may make things in real life more rewarding to experience, because you can look at them from points of view that wouldn’t have occurred to you if you were only going on your own experience. Some of this may come via very unexpected routes, such as the time when I ended up playing sports and ended up appreciating them more due to my gaming experience:
Don’t throw hedonism out of your 1000 year plan so easily. The described habits are not bad for their hedonism, they are bad because they are easy, boring, and safe. They compare to 1000 year hedonism the same way joining the local jogging club or nature group compares to a tour in the armed forces. If you want to expand yourself, make life hard, build a stronger ego, try out a WoW addiction, or push your sexual comfort zone.
Disclaimer: These suggestions may be bad, may be good, but I the perspective is consistent with the 1000 year plan. It is important to recognize that the listed vices (tv, games, etc.) are unwanted because there are boring, nothing to do with hedonism.
wat? Maybe heroin while I’m at it?
I see how you can interpret it that way, but I do in fact mean that the value of hedonism in general cannot compete with the other kinds of value at stake.
Greetings to the above comment’s author’s six-month future self!
Did you do the switch? Did you experience the expected skills boost?
Hrm. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten better at what I do, but I certainly know a crapton more than I did when I started, mostly because of exposure to new (to me) technologies. So I would say yes. It’s too soon to say if it’s begun to level off, but I suspect not, since my responsibilities are still in flux.
Thank you for the followup.
ping for another follow up.
I have definitely gotten better at what I do, but I have also definitely leveled off again. I’m seriously considering another job switch for that reason. Probably in-company rather than out-of-company because I like working here.
Thanks for the followup!
I disagree with several of your points, but I upvoted this post anyway because I think this is the type of thing that we should be discussing more on LessWrong. I’ll have a more substantive reply tomorrow.
Thanks, looking forward to it.
Is there a better term for this than anything usually associated with a cold and ruthless blood-sucking nocturnal killer?
Power Leveling
I prefer to think of it as immortal, strong, smart, experienced, connected, a little bit edgy, and very very cool. It’s not like this is going to inspire anyone to suck blood...
If you must, call it “How to live for 1000 years”
Or how to level up 100x faster :)
Alternative? Yes. Better? Not that I’ve seen so far. :P
To quote Indiana Jones: “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.”
I think they mean “the most interesting man in the world.” It’s true that this is a recognizable enough concept that
(a) an advertising company made a series of ads based on it, and
(b) this itself was successful enough to have spawned its own memes.
Lazarus Long was a pretty cool guy :-)
Probably, but how much of that was actually useful for, say, making more money? And did he learn more than he would have if he’d spend the summer reading random interesting stuff on the internet? (Much lower status, but not obviously less educational.)
BTW, as far as I can tell Eliezer spent several years of his life doing fairly slow work on a rationality book as his primary project, and this book never ended up getting published. So I’m not sure he should be held up as an example of someone who gets a lot done. (And this seems to be what he himself has indicated in his writings on procrastination.) Beware the halo effect.
(I liked this post but wanted to play devil’s advocate.)
People seem to be taking issue with that example. It was kindof an outlier wrt to what I was trying to illustrate, but very salient so it came to my mind. Certainly that experience was not optimal or safe, but still, he learned a lot.
Maybe I’m biased by my own mental style, but nearly everything about fighting in a revolution would be new, and I extract a lot of learning from experiences, and that learning seems to come up in the weirdest places. I doubt a smart person could come out of that experience without being a few years ahead.
As I mentioned earlier, I like this post, but a lot of the suggestions seem very hazardous. For instance, you write that “You may remember early in the Arabian revolutions in Libya, an American student took the summer off college to fight in the revolution. I bet he learned a lot. If you could do enough things like that, you’d be well on your way to matching the vampire.”
It doesn’t strike me that this is even a remotely good idea for personal development reasons, and I’m not even talking about the risk of death.
If you want to optimize your life for adventure, that’s fine—I once knew someone who held that the only things anyone actually optimized their life for were money, love, and adventure, and everything else was fake. But it doesn’t seem to me that this is necessarily good for learning.
People often say that I have had an unusually wide range of experiences, and in many respects that is true. However, it isn’t clear to me that this is a strategy that people should intentionally play. I know several people who have essentially optimized their lives for having crazy experiences, and to me this seems much more questionable than one might expect. Eventually—and often quite rapidly—“having crazy experiences” itself becomes a thing that these individuals are doing too much.
Much like being cool, classy, or honest, trying to be interesting or do interesting things often does not make you interesting—indeed it can make you the reverse. I think a perhaps better tactic is to find the interestingness in otherwise mundane activities. In my experience this can yield similar benefits to intentionally trying to go out and do interesting things, but has much lower costs.
Down that path wireheading lies.
I find a future in which we are all steered to skydive and fight revolutions and found companies far more terrifying than wireheading.
Well, I hope we’d both agree that a future in which people who want to want to skydive and fight revolutions and found companies can do so and people who want to want to wirehead can do so is better than either.
I wish there were a term as powerful as wireheading that likewise condemned signaling anti-authoritarianism...
Perhaps “raging against the machine?”
I don’t understand what you mean. Please clarify
This seems sensible and good, and I have essentially nothing to add.
Maybe that Libya thing was a bad example? I meant to encourage less dangerous self-development. And then, yeah, just doing self development with no glorious works produced is failure by infinite meta.
I’m not sure that the example of your friend who joined the Army and then became a millionaire means much: most people who joined the Army did not become millionaires; most millionaires were never in the Army.
After reading this, I stuck a note saying “Be a vampire” to the front of my computer (which is my main source of procrastination).
Also, this post reminds me of the fact that being a hard sciences student is one of the things which helps me keep ‘leveling up’ on a regular basis, which is strong motivation to get me to do my coursework.
Sweet. Glad to hear it inspired you.
...I keep forgetting that for normal people, sleeping in is actually lazy, and not a survival tactic to recover from the sleep deprivation of doing 12 hour rotating day-night shifts in time to do more shifts.
I’ve had this attitude of “do hard things” for a while, although the hard things I’ve done (mainly jumping into critical care nursing as a new grad) aren’t super typical for LW. I guess technically I work a wage job, but it’s also incredibly meaningful work that pushes me to my limits every single day and is gradually transforming me into the kind of person I want to be; y’know, calm under pressure, smiling in the face of adversity, organized, good at teamwork, good at empathy and reading people’s emotions, etc.
I’ve considered joining the army for a similar reason of pushing myself to become stronger. Unsure if I will still do this, as moving to the Bay Area is probably higher value.
For me, the military did not push me nearly as hard as I expected. Pushed myself harder while preparing for it than I was pushed in Basic Training. Advise not doing this, or at least joining Marine Corps instead for proper pushing. There are also things (i.e. Tough Mudder) that can similarly physically push you without requiring you to sign a contract.
This is a good point; there are almost certainly ways to get the important parts of the military experience without paying the costs.
Especially since LWers presumably disagree enough with their governments that helping out the military in any way itself counts as a cost.
Why would you presume that?
But probably not a significant one in the scheme of things.
What’s your MOS (or equivalent)?
Explosive ordnance disposal
Interesting, would you be willing to say more about your experience? That definitely sounds to me like something that would be an interesting and difficult challenge.
There is little to tell. Basic Training has more to do with getting used to being miserable than actually pushing yourself. The actual job training is somewhat more challenging, but only because there is very little room for error. You aren’t allowed to bring stuff home to study either, so there’s little extra you could do even if you wanted to.
I did force myself up and down 800-some steps (as in a staircase sort of thing) while wearing about 90 lbs (I weigh 140) of gear, but that was completely voluntary. It was excruciating, but I recognized that quitting would have to be a conscious choice not to take another step, so I just didn’t do that. I did stop before I had properly finished, but that was only because my legs were about to stop supporting me. It shouldn’t be that hard to find an exercise program that gives a similar effect, without being anywhere nearly as bad for your body.
The biggest thing I learned is that you have a choice about your attitude. When doing sucky things, I’ve noticed that there are two main ways that people do it. They either complain, or they laugh at the people who are complaining. Either way, you’re miserable, but at least the second group has something to laugh about.
Sorry that kind of rambled. I hope I answered the question to your satisfaction.
Me, I prefer complaining. Even when it doesn’t accomplish anything, I usually feel better afterward anyway.
Often thinks about where they are on the experience curve for everything they do, and takes action on that when appropriate,
Maintains a habit of doing stuff now and visualizing those opportunity costs,
Puts themselves in a stimulating environment like the bay area intellectual community and surrounds themselves with stimulating people and events,
Seeks out the hardest character-building experiences like getting tear gassed in a trench or building a company from scratch,
This is a subset of the more general:
.1. Think carefully about the general issue of how you want to spend your time.
(By, for example, making a plan to move the way you currently live your life closer towards the way you want it to be, including ways of changing things about yourself, such as your habits or values, that will be needed in order to ensure that you actually carry the plan out.)
.2. Decide what importance level making those changes has for you, and then track your progress to see that you are actually spending an effort upon carrying out the plan that is proportionate to that importance (ie compensate for distortion caused by immediacy, and other cognitive biases)
That has been made specific to the goal of wanting to spend much of your time accruing personal experience in an efficient manner.
I’m not sure the goal is a well stated one. When you think of a 1000 year old vampire, are you envying the amount of varied information he knows, the skill set he has acquired, the things he has achieved or the self-knowledge and ‘wisdom’ he has acquired? All these things may be linked to “experience”, but if you only want experience in order to gain some of those things, setting the goal in more precise terms might lead to slightly different tactics of acquiring it being indicated.
When I think of a 1000 year old vampire (in relevant ways), I think of the fact that he is not subject to some of the constraints that us mere mortals are subject to. You can give us mere humans advice about how to better live within those constraints, but that seems to me to miss the spirt of the difference.
In fact, the whole argument “you can be like a 1000 year old vampire” seems to amount to “life extension isn’t all that great. You can do as well without it as you can with it. If you live your life properly, you have no need to live longer”. I think that in any other context, people here would recognize that that is a pro-death position and should be fought.
Would you similarly interpret an article about how to spend less money for the things I want to buy as opposing earning more money?
WTF? Where did you get that? If our standard of charity says that is what OP says, it paraphrases your comment as “We don’t have real life extension, so we shouldn’t even try to live better because it doesn’t solve the main problem”. You didn’t really mean that, though. Maybe you think I should have paid more lip service to the glory of real life extension? If so, buzz off; I had no need of that hypothesis.
Obviously both are wrong: we should try to live better and achieve life extension.
Good post, I’m already trying to follow most of the advice given and over the last two years I’ve arguably done more than in about eight years prior, with lots of room to improve still. Still working on moving to an area with more of a rationalist community unfortunately, where I am there is effectively none. Also, :%s/lead/led/g in “Fought in battles, lead armies, built great works”.
Nyan - at least a few of your posts are backed by some pretty powerful imagery. It seems like it might be effective to create visual summaries of them (to remind oneself of the content on a routine basis, not as a substitute for reading the original piece.)
Sure. I’m not going to do it (then again, if I were doing 500 times as much, perhaps it could be fit in...), but I’d be glad to comment on anything that was produced.
Also, thanks for the compliment!
Playing video (or other) games isn’t necessarily a waste of time, depending on how far you go with it and what you want to get awesome at… :)
Diminishing returns. I’m glad I’ve played video games. I’m also glad I’m not currently playing video games.
Yes it depends on your goals. Don’t construct your goals just to preclude learning, though; getting strong is very likely to be a good idea, thus arguments against it are very suspect.
This strikes me as a very useful heuristic.
In strategy games there’s a problem some players have where they spend too long building up a huge economy and forget to spend any of it on an actual army.
Honestly I already doubt that any further self-improvement could increase my rate of Fun. I’m enjoying my life, I’m in a decent financial position, I have good friends.… More awesome people don’t seem to be any happier than me.
Interesting… Not sure what it means… What might a head epistemologist’s day look like?
It’s hard to know.
I’m missing something here. I feel like there’s a joke about epistemology and knowing but I don’t quite get it.
It’s not much of a joke to begin with, and is attenuated to effective nonexistence by being explained, so I’ll just say it’s riffing on epistemology being the study of the nature of knowledge and leave it at that.
I’ll remove that because it’s irrelevant, but basically “everything needs to stop while nyan takes a look, gathers all information with his eagle eyes, correlates it, and works out what’s going on.”
It was highly temporary; the CTO is now back and obviously takes over that role.
This is all premised on the assumption that getting more things done, learning, and acquiring skills are the point of life.
This is very likely false.
So there’s another step of analyzing how much accomplishing all of this stuff actually helps you or anyone else.
Adding to this, there is an entire online community of these people at the Black Flag Cafe. Outsiders label them as “war tourists,” but the majority of them are journalists, war photographers, businessmen, and humanitarians/activists. The website was founded by Robert Young Pelton (whose wikipedia page is worth reading). He wrote a great book, that is filled with practical information.
It is not entirely clear what experiences you have in mind. Obviously many differnt.
Heinlein comes to mind:
“A human being should be able to
change a diaper,
plan an invasion,
butcher a hog,
conn a ship,
design a building,
write a sonnet,
balance accounts,
build a wall,
set a bone,
comfort the dying,
take orders,
give orders,
cooperate,
act alone,
solve equations,
analyze a new problem,
pitch manure,
program a computer,
cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently,
die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.”
The latter makes a requirement of it clear: Broadness of experience. Interestingly this is at stark contrast with our society relying on specialization. Why is that? Because specialization is about efficiency but broadness enables integration and new things?
Which of these are neccessary for a formidable 1000-year-old vampire?
weeps at being just a 500-day-old troll
Feedback: This essay includes a few suggestions which might be valuable to pursue or do, but I downvoted the essay mainly for pulling numbers out of nowhere throughout the post.
Saying boosts your productivity or life experience or awesomeness by factor Y is something I expect from self-help books (for a horrible example thereof, see the book Eat That Frog), not from Less Wrong.
Single which?
There are different ways to deal with that:
Minimizing the chores—obviously if they are chores you want to do as little of them as possible. If only they’d be neccessary. If they weren’t you wouldn’t do them, or?
Delegate the chores—either to one for whome these are no chores or who doesn’t mind
Enjoy the chores—if they are inevitable (for whatever reason) you should apply the Litany of Tarski or alternatively the serenity prayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer—after all whan cannot be changed can at least be made into fun possibly?
Reinterpret the chores—Many tasks can be made interesting. Can it be done different? More interesting? Split? Shared? Analysed in interesting ways?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I have no such evidence. I guess I should make it clearer that this is somewhat self-consciously absurd motivational imagery, rather than predictive statements.
Note that the actual prediction was 2x or 3x for what someone could really get.
Power Leveling
Good advice overall. Just to give a counterpoint that may or may not be related to the post:
Yes, doing this kind of stuff can make you happier, but I’m not sure if I want to give that advice to other people. It might also make them unhappy if they keep kicking themselves to become more awesome day after day and keep failing anyway. This happens a lot. And if they succeed, it’ll make many other people unhappy by comparison, and raise the standard that other people must reach before they allow themselves to be happy...
I don’t know if it’s a strong argument. It probably depends on what kind of society you want to live in. Most of LW will probably disagree, but as for me, I don’t like competitiveness. I don’t enjoy being competitive, and I don’t enjoy being around competitive people. I feel that it’s like defecting in the PD. Winners will say it was good for them, and losers won’t be heard.
You might say that improving yourself isn’t about competition, but I disagree. Becoming more awesome is about status competition, and status is zero-sum. You’ll only be happy if you’re more awesome than others. Otherwise you’d be happy already, because you can walk and talk and think, isn’t that awesome by itself?
I wish there was a kind of rationality that emphasized cooperation. Not like TDT’s advice to cooperate in the PD if the other guy is similar to you, but more like a list of biases that stop us from cooperating in everyday life. Does such a thing exist?
In some contexts I like competition, even when I am losing, although obviously much more when I am winning. I guess it’s when I care more about the absolute outcome than about my relative position in the race, and when besides winning and losing there is a default third position of not trying at all, which is even worse than losing (though it may not feel so to the people who simply ignore the race).
For example, right now I am developing mobile games and I am comparing myself with a friend who is also developing mobile games, and he does it at least twice faster than me. I guess I would feel better being the first one, but I still prefer having some else compete with me to doing it alone. -- A few years ago I was in a running competition, which is highly unusual for me, and I was almost the last. It still felt good, because it was a huge improvement from never participating in such a competition. (Though I guess being literally the last one would be depressing.)
I am so tired of so many people around me not even trying that I welcome a competition even if I know that I am likely to lose. Actually, there is something good about losing: it shows that there is still a lot of opportunity to grow (and in the best case someone who already did it and could give me advice).
When I was at the CFAR Rationality Minicamp, compared with some other participants I felt like a loser. And at the same time, it was a great feeling: it was like being a new student at Hogwarts and seeing the magic the older students can do. It felt like a plan.
The chinese curse comes to mind:
“May you live in interesting times” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times )
This can be a curse for all the risks (mentioned in other comments) involved.
Intersting is that the source names an increment to that curse:
“May your wishes be granted.”