A Proposed Litany
I was meditating on the word “disillusionment” the other day, and it stuck me as odd that it has such a negative connotation… doesn’t being disillusioned mean that you see a truth that was previously hidden from you by a mirage of falsehood? The human-universal negative emotional response to finding out you were wrong seems counterproductive in the extreme, and I’m still working towards eliminating it from my mind. So I crafted this brief litany, and I think that with some help from the LW community it could become a useful tool for rationalists, much like the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin. My “first draft” is:
“If you love truth, learn to love finding out you were wrong. If you hate illusion, learn to love disillusionment. If your emotions are not appropriate to your values, do something about it!”
What say you?
The first two sentences are pretty good, but last one is long and clunky. Can I suggest as a second draft, “If you love truth, learn to love correction. If you hate illusion, learn to love disillusionment. If you want to improve, do not run from change.”
The last sentence doesn’t seem too relevant to the rest of it; a proposed litany should be short, elegant, and focused.
As for the rest of it: “learn to love finding out you were wrong” isn’t quite it… it’s much better to find out that you were already right. The thing I prefer to convey is more like “learn to love finding out you were wrong, conditional on your having actually been wrong”. (Which is inelegant, but is not an attempted litany, just a description of what I’m getting at.) My usual litany of this type is “If I am wrong, I want to find out, so I can become more right.”
I like the spirit, but the phrasing needs work. I’m probably not the best person to ask about this but here’s what I can identify that needs improvement.
1) “learn to love finding out you were wrong” feels long and clunky. Can we say this in fewer syllables?
2) For some reason, having three sentences of the same form carries a lot of impact, while having only two feels weak. We need another sentence of the form “if you X, then learn to love Y”. Perhaps we could change the third sentence to fit this form?
3) “If your emotions are not appropriate to your values” also feels long and clunky.
Sorry about not offering much constructive, but since I’m hopefully not the best writer on this site someone else ought to.
How about “If you love truth, learn to love correction”?
1) “yearn to discover your errors”?
For the second sentence, “If you hate illusion, seek to be disillusioned.”
I don’t have a rephrasing of the third, but something expressing the idea of “taking joy in the real” might work.
If I were to seek to be disillusioned my approach would be to acquire as many illusions as possible as fast as possible while also exposing myself to an intense yet unstable stream of real world stimulus. (The original version does not provide this kind of ‘game me’ exhortation.)
I think that with litanies you’re supposed to pay attention to the spirit rather than the letter.
And good litanies manage to unite spirit, letter and aesthetics into an elegant whole.
Even at the level of ‘spirit’, “seek to be disillusioned” doesn’t feel right to me. It misses the point. “Learn to love” actually conveyed a fundamentally better message.
I completely disagree. “Seek to be disillusioned” seems like exactly the message I would want to convey, like “actively try to remove all your misconceptions” but shorter. “Learn to love being disillusioned” seems a bit weaker.
That’s fine, just so long as it is not presented as “a useful tool for rationalists, much like the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin”. There’s just an element of ironic arationality to it that would make excessive repetition here cringe-worthy.
It does: if you love disillusionment, then your approach could be the same.
But with the possible exception of formalised mathematics, there is nothing that one person can say to another that cannot be “gamed”. (I confidently expect that the instant reaction of most readers of LessWrong to that statement will be to try to think up an exception.)
This expression of my desire cannot be gamed.
(Self-reference might need to be included along with formalised mathematics. Arguably the sentence is not gameable because it becomes meaningless if gamed and meaningless sentences can’t be gamed)
Maximise my utility!
I will brainwash you into representing your utility by a number on a piece of paper. Then I will write ∞ on it.
That isn’t maximising my utility. That is maximising the utility of some other thing in the future.
All maximizations are going to take place in the future: they already haven’t taken place up to the present.
Your complaint is that “that thing”, the future you, isn’t similar enough to the present you. Fair enough. It’s hard to say anything about maximizing your utility as it is now if we assume zero knowledge about your utility function.
3) sounds like, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one your with”
Other old hippies will know
But I was born in 1982...
Any and all comments are appreciated! Your point about parallel structure is a very good one; I will be sure to think about how to apply it to what I want to say. I know that I have a tendency to write very “long and clunky” sentences, so maybe I should aim to be as terse as possible.
I think that there is a use of the negative emotion of disillusionment that you are missing. When you switch to a more negative belief about a person based on new information for example, simply thinking about them differently in the future is not enough to adjust your emotional relationship to what you now think is appropriate. The time you spent believing the positive lie still counts in their favor instinctually. The pain of disillusion corrects for that.
If Santa isn’t real I want to retroactively cancel all of my fondness for him so that my history of believing in him can no longer influence me. That happening all at once hurts a lot. The motivating to face this pain is not just the desire for more knowledge. It has to be balanced by feeling an appropriate amount of fuzzies if my belief in Santa is confirmed by the experiment of pointing a hidden web cam at the fireplace. If we weren’t loss averse they would cancel for the same reason you can only try to test hypotheses rather than to confirm them.
You can’t try to be legitimately disillusioned or the opposite. You can only try to gain knowledge. So satisfied curiosity breaks the tie rather than replaces disillusionment.
The term disillusionment frames the event as one having lost something, and given that most people probably think that illusions are often good things (everybody, like, has their own truth, dude), it’s easy to see why disillusionment would have a negative connotation.
What it really should be is something like en-sight or en-knowledgement, focusing on the positive aspect of seeing something that one was previously blind to or knowing something one was previously ignorant of.
I like your point about disillusionment, but I don’t like litanies.
most people’s near and far values are incoherent wrt each other.