P.S. If you really want to know how I feel about Less Wrong then read the post ‘Ontological Therapy’ by user:muflax.
Is there something wrong with me when I see writing like that and it fills me with nostalgia for days of yore when I had more philosophical crises happening closer together? I have this weird sense that there’s an opportunity for some kind of “It Gets Better thing” for young philosophers (except, of course, there’s so few of them that stochastic noise and inability to reach the audience would make such a media campaign pointless: an inter-subjectively opaque discourse to no one).
So far it does seem to get better. I haven’t had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I’ve acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.
One important thing I’ve found is finding conversational partners who are willing to listen to your abstract digressions and then contribute useful insights. If you’re doing everything all by yourself there is a sense in which you are like “a feral child” and you should probably try to seek out others and learn to talk with them about what’s going on in your respective souls. Whiteboards help. Internet-mediated-text doesn’t help nearly as much as conversation in my experience. Dialogue is a different and probably better process and the low latency and high “monkey bandwidth” are important and helpful.
I have this weird sense that there’s an opportunity for some kind of “It Gets Better thing” for young philosophers
We would need to identify the sort of things that can go wrong. For example, I can identify two types of philosophic horror at the world (there might be more). One is where the world seems to have become objectively horrifying, and you can’t escape from this perception, or don’t want to escape from it because you believe this would require the sacrifice of your reason, values, or personality. A complementary type is where you believe the world could become infinitely better, if only everyone did X, but you’re the only one who wants to do X, no-one else will support you, and in fact they try to talk you out of your ideas.
Example of the first: I know someone who believes in Many Worlds and is about to kill himself unless he can prove to himself that the worlds are “diverging” (in the jargon of Alastair Wilson) rather than “splitting”. “Diverging worlds” are each self-contained, like in a single-world theory, but they can track each other for a time (i.e. the history of one will match the history of the other up to a point). “Splitting worlds” are self-explanatory—worlds that start as one and branch into many. What’s so bad about the splitting worlds, he says, is that the people in this world, that you know and care about, are the ones who experience all possible outcomes, who get murdered by you in branches where you spontaneously become a killer (and add every bad thing you can think of, and can’t, to the list of what happens to them). Also, distinct from this, human existence is somehow rendered meaningless because everything always happens. (I think the meaninglessness has to do with the inability to make a difference or produce outcomes, and not just the inconceivability of all possibilities being real.) In the self-contained “diverging worlds”, the people you know just have one fate—their copies in the other worlds are different people—and you’re saved from the horror and nihilism of the branching worlds.
Example of the second: recent LW visitor “Singularity_Utopia”, who on the one hand says that an infinite perfect future of immortality and superintelligence is coming as soon as 2045, and we don’t even need to work on friendliness, just focus on increasing intelligence, and that meanwhile the world could start becoming better right now if everyone embraced the knowledge of imminent “post-scarcity”… but who at the same time says on his website that his life is a living hell. I think that without a doubt this is someone whose suffering is intimately linked with the fact that they have a message of universal joy that no-one is listening to.
Now if someone proposes to be a freelance philosophical Hippocrates, they have their work cut out for them. The “victims” of these mental states tend to be very intelligent and strong-willed. Example number one thinks you could only be a psychopath to want to live in that sort of universe, so he doesn’t want to solve his problem by changing his attitude towards splitting worlds; the only positive solution would be to discover that this ontology is objectively unlikely. Example number two is trying to save the world by living his life this way, so I suppose it seems supremely important to keep it up. He might be even less likely to change his ways.
He’s still alive, but medicated and still miserable; by his account, only able to think for a few hours each day. MWI is his personal basilisk. For a while last year, he was excited when the Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft was proposing to get quantum field theory from cellular automata, but that was only for very special QFTs, and no-one else has built on those papers so far. Right now he’s down because everyone he asks thinks David Wallace (Oxford exponent of MWI) is brilliant. I originally heard from him because of my skepticism about MWI, expressed many times on this site.
It took me 3 months to realize that I completely failed to inquire about your second friend. I must have seen him as having the lesser problem and dismissed it out of hand, without realizing that acknowledging the perceived ease of a problem isn’t the same as actually solving it, like putting off easy homework.
He isn’t my friend, he’s just some guy who decided to be a singularity cheerleader. But his website is still the same—super-AI is inherently good and can’t come soon enough, scarcity is the cause of most problems and abundance is coming and will fix it, life in the pre-singularity world is tragic and boring and bearable only because the future will be infinitely better.
So far it does seem to get better. I haven’t had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I’ve acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.
So far as I can tell, my resilience in this way is not an acquired defect but rather than an acquired sophistication.
When my working philosophic assumptions crashed in the past, I learned a number of ways to handle it. For one example, I’ve seen that when something surprises me, for the most partit all adds up to normality and crazy new ways of looking at the world it are generally not important in normal circumstances for daily human life. I still have to get dressed every morning and eat food like a mortal, but now I have a new tool to apply in special cases or leverage in contexts where I can control many parameters and apply more of an engineering mindset and get better outcomes. For a specific example, variations on egoism put me in a state of profound aporeia for about 3 months in high school, but eventually I worked out enough of a model of motivational psychology with enough moving parts that I could reconcile what I actually saw of people’s pursuit of things they “wanted” and translate naive people’s emission of words like “values” and “selfish” and “moral” and so on in ways that made sense, even if it sometimes demonstrated philosophic confusions similar to wish fulfillment fantasies.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
Eliezer’s quoting of Feynman in the compartmentalization link seems naive to me, but it’s a naivete that I shared when I was 19. His text there might have appealed to me then because it whispers to the the part of my soul that wants to just work on an interesting puzzle and get the right answer and apply it to the world and have a good life doing that. The same part of my soul and says that anything which might require compromises during a political competition for research resources isn’t actually about a political competition for resources but is instead just other people “being dumb”. Its nicer to think of yourself as having a scientific insight rather than an ignorance of the pragmatics of political economy. Science is fun and morally praiseworthy and a lot of people are interested in doing it. But where there’s muck, there’s brass so it is tricky to figure out a way to be entirely devoted to that and get paid at the same time.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
The stoning adulterers part is an extreme hypothetical example of taking a Christian meme to its logical conclusion. As PhilGoetz mentioned in the post, secular memes can also have this problem. The same even applies to some of the ‘rationalist’ memes around here.
One important thing I’ve found is finding conversational partners who are willing to listen to your abstract digressions and then contribute useful insights. If you’re doing everything all by yourself there is a sense in which you are like “a feral child” and you should probably try to seek out others and learn to talk with them about what’s going on in your respective souls. Whiteboards help. Internet-mediated-text doesn’t help nearly as much as conversation in my experience. Dialogue is a different and probably better process and the low latency and high “monkey bandwidth” are important and helpful.
Any sort of feedback seems able to break loops like these crises. It’s kind of odd. I’ve wondered if there’s a concrete empirical explanation related to neural networks and priming—the looping renders you literally unable to think of any creative objections or insights.
Is there something wrong with me when I see writing like that and it fills me with nostalgia for days of yore when I had more philosophical crises happening closer together? I have this weird sense that there’s an opportunity for some kind of “It Gets Better thing” for young philosophers (except, of course, there’s so few of them that stochastic noise and inability to reach the audience would make such a media campaign pointless: an inter-subjectively opaque discourse to no one).
So far it does seem to get better. I haven’t had a good solid philosophic crisis in something like five years and I almost miss them now. Life was more exciting back then. When I have ideas that seem like they could precipitate that way now, it mostly just leaves me with a sense that I’ve acquired an interesting new insight that is pretty neat but increases the amount of inferential distance I have to keep track of when talking to other people.
One important thing I’ve found is finding conversational partners who are willing to listen to your abstract digressions and then contribute useful insights. If you’re doing everything all by yourself there is a sense in which you are like “a feral child” and you should probably try to seek out others and learn to talk with them about what’s going on in your respective souls. Whiteboards help. Internet-mediated-text doesn’t help nearly as much as conversation in my experience. Dialogue is a different and probably better process and the low latency and high “monkey bandwidth” are important and helpful.
Seek friends. Really. Seek friends.
We would need to identify the sort of things that can go wrong. For example, I can identify two types of philosophic horror at the world (there might be more). One is where the world seems to have become objectively horrifying, and you can’t escape from this perception, or don’t want to escape from it because you believe this would require the sacrifice of your reason, values, or personality. A complementary type is where you believe the world could become infinitely better, if only everyone did X, but you’re the only one who wants to do X, no-one else will support you, and in fact they try to talk you out of your ideas.
Example of the first: I know someone who believes in Many Worlds and is about to kill himself unless he can prove to himself that the worlds are “diverging” (in the jargon of Alastair Wilson) rather than “splitting”. “Diverging worlds” are each self-contained, like in a single-world theory, but they can track each other for a time (i.e. the history of one will match the history of the other up to a point). “Splitting worlds” are self-explanatory—worlds that start as one and branch into many. What’s so bad about the splitting worlds, he says, is that the people in this world, that you know and care about, are the ones who experience all possible outcomes, who get murdered by you in branches where you spontaneously become a killer (and add every bad thing you can think of, and can’t, to the list of what happens to them). Also, distinct from this, human existence is somehow rendered meaningless because everything always happens. (I think the meaninglessness has to do with the inability to make a difference or produce outcomes, and not just the inconceivability of all possibilities being real.) In the self-contained “diverging worlds”, the people you know just have one fate—their copies in the other worlds are different people—and you’re saved from the horror and nihilism of the branching worlds.
Example of the second: recent LW visitor “Singularity_Utopia”, who on the one hand says that an infinite perfect future of immortality and superintelligence is coming as soon as 2045, and we don’t even need to work on friendliness, just focus on increasing intelligence, and that meanwhile the world could start becoming better right now if everyone embraced the knowledge of imminent “post-scarcity”… but who at the same time says on his website that his life is a living hell. I think that without a doubt this is someone whose suffering is intimately linked with the fact that they have a message of universal joy that no-one is listening to.
Now if someone proposes to be a freelance philosophical Hippocrates, they have their work cut out for them. The “victims” of these mental states tend to be very intelligent and strong-willed. Example number one thinks you could only be a psychopath to want to live in that sort of universe, so he doesn’t want to solve his problem by changing his attitude towards splitting worlds; the only positive solution would be to discover that this ontology is objectively unlikely. Example number two is trying to save the world by living his life this way, so I suppose it seems supremely important to keep it up. He might be even less likely to change his ways.
How did your first friend turn out?
He’s still alive, but medicated and still miserable; by his account, only able to think for a few hours each day. MWI is his personal basilisk. For a while last year, he was excited when the Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft was proposing to get quantum field theory from cellular automata, but that was only for very special QFTs, and no-one else has built on those papers so far. Right now he’s down because everyone he asks thinks David Wallace (Oxford exponent of MWI) is brilliant. I originally heard from him because of my skepticism about MWI, expressed many times on this site.
Is he still on Less Wrong?
Not really (though I told him about this thread). He spends his time corresponding directly with physicists and philosophers.
Any way for me to contact him?
(Taken to PM.)
Hang on, didn’t Everett believe that in the event of death, his consciousness would just follow a stream of events that lead to his not being dead?
Maybe consider introducing him to instrumentalism. Worrying to death about untestables is kind of sad.
It took me 3 months to realize that I completely failed to inquire about your second friend. I must have seen him as having the lesser problem and dismissed it out of hand, without realizing that acknowledging the perceived ease of a problem isn’t the same as actually solving it, like putting off easy homework.
How is your second friend turning out?
He isn’t my friend, he’s just some guy who decided to be a singularity cheerleader. But his website is still the same—super-AI is inherently good and can’t come soon enough, scarcity is the cause of most problems and abundance is coming and will fix it, life in the pre-singularity world is tragic and boring and bearable only because the future will be infinitely better.
I wonder how much of this is due to acquiring a memetic immune system or otherwise simply learning how to compartmentalize.
So far as I can tell, my resilience in this way is not an acquired defect but rather than an acquired sophistication.
When my working philosophic assumptions crashed in the past, I learned a number of ways to handle it. For one example, I’ve seen that when something surprises me, for the most part it all adds up to normality and crazy new ways of looking at the world it are generally not important in normal circumstances for daily human life. I still have to get dressed every morning and eat food like a mortal, but now I have a new tool to apply in special cases or leverage in contexts where I can control many parameters and apply more of an engineering mindset and get better outcomes. For a specific example, variations on egoism put me in a state of profound aporeia for about 3 months in high school, but eventually I worked out enough of a model of motivational psychology with enough moving parts that I could reconcile what I actually saw of people’s pursuit of things they “wanted” and translate naive people’s emission of words like “values” and “selfish” and “moral” and so on in ways that made sense, even if it sometimes demonstrated philosophic confusions similar to wish fulfillment fantasies.
It helps, perhaps, that my parents didn’t force some crazy literalistic theism down my throat but rather tended to do things like tell me that I should keep an open mind and never stop asking “why?” the way most people do for some reason. Its not like I suddenly starting taking the verbal/theoretical content of my brain seriously in an act of parental defiance and accidentally took up adulterer stoning because that had been laying around in my head in an unexamined way. I was never encouraged to stone adulterers. I was raised on a farm in the redwoods by parents without college degrees and sent off to academia naively thinking it worked the way that it does in stories about Science And Progress. If I have such confusions remaining, my guess is that I take epistemology too seriously and imagine that other people might be helped by being better at it :-P
Eliezer’s quoting of Feynman in the compartmentalization link seems naive to me, but it’s a naivete that I shared when I was 19. His text there might have appealed to me then because it whispers to the the part of my soul that wants to just work on an interesting puzzle and get the right answer and apply it to the world and have a good life doing that. The same part of my soul and says that anything which might require compromises during a political competition for research resources isn’t actually about a political competition for resources but is instead just other people “being dumb”. Its nicer to think of yourself as having a scientific insight rather than an ignorance of the pragmatics of political economy. Science is fun and morally praiseworthy and a lot of people are interested in doing it. But where there’s muck, there’s brass so it is tricky to figure out a way to be entirely devoted to that and get paid at the same time.
The stoning adulterers part is an extreme hypothetical example of taking a Christian meme to its logical conclusion. As PhilGoetz mentioned in the post, secular memes can also have this problem. The same even applies to some of the ‘rationalist’ memes around here.
Any sort of feedback seems able to break loops like these crises. It’s kind of odd. I’ve wondered if there’s a concrete empirical explanation related to neural networks and priming—the looping renders you literally unable to think of any creative objections or insights.
I’ve always hesitated telling others about the problem for fear of spreading the memetic immunity disorder to somebody else.