Can you give us some numbers? How long have you been doing this? What is your average day (better yet: yesterday) like?
I tried something like this when I was very young—middle school, maybe. I think the most embarrassing part was where I decided I would never have any interest in the opposite sex, because that would be a distraction. It lasted for about a week before I decided maybe there was something to this “being human” thing after all, and put it all down to childhood exuberance and never tried anything of that sort again.
...but if you can actually pull it off, you are my new hero.
I don’t actually have any numbers on hand, and to be clear, I don’t claim to have achieved any level of sheer awesomeness, but rather only that I’m a better person than I used to be. (This is by no means a high bar.) You ask, how long have I been doing this—but I can’t point to any discrete start; my personality has been in a sort of gradual flux in what I’ve been calling “these days of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain”—dating back to my nervous breakdown of 29 November 2007.
This was actually sort of my point: life is continuous. When you have a discrete goal, an explicit program with a start date and an end date, you can just fail. Whereas when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win. You seemed to be saying that when you have an open-ended goal, that just gives you an excuse to cheat. Whereas I’m working under the theory that if I want to cheat, I’ve already lost.
All this might tie into why I can’t deal with school: they give you a curriculum, and all the good thoughts you have that aren’t on the curriculum don’t count, and everything that is on the curriculum that you didn’t do is a mark of sin upon your soul, because you have a duty to perfectly obey the teacher’s commands. It’s too precise—arbitrarily precise. I realize that most people probably aren’t like this—somehow they can muddle through the system without being driven to madness by all the little details. Most people have not thrown crying fits contemplating how they got a B in that poetry class, even though they weren’t sure they did all of the reading, and therefore might not have truly deserved that B. Nor is it common, I imagine, to worry about what constitutes a “reading”—they tell you to read the chapter, but what does that mean?---if my eyes skim over a paragraph, do I have to go back and make sure I touch every word? I just want to be good! What do you want from me?!
I tried to obey. I couldn’t. What would constitute obedience is either underspecified or overspecified; I can’t figure out which. I need a different methodology if I am simply going to exist. Explicit rules and goals sum over far too many details. It might help to have handy verbal guidelines and best practices, but ultimately these are only useful if you really care about what you’re doing. And if you really care about what you’re doing, then you can’t be so utterly dependent on the guidelines. “How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.” I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing. But I think I repeat myself.
Did you go to school, did you go to school for a while and then leave, or are you entirely self-taught?
Your method is clearly better if you are able to think like that successfully, and my method is mostly born from the observation that I can’t. I’ve heard it said that one of the effects of spending a decade or two in the school system is that it twists your mind to think more in the way typical of my system and less in the way typical of yours. And I find that people who managed to avoid school almost entirely, like Eliezer, radiate a sort of psychological healthiness I can only dream of.
I had the same feelings about school as you did, my parents refused to let me leave, and I ended out, over a few years, becoming the sort of person who could tolerate the school experience. Sometimes I worry that the process made me less able to do a lot of other things, like strive for excellence in the way you’re describing.
Posing as the arena in which students will finally get to engage in true mathematical reasoning, this virus attacks mathematics at its heart, destroying the very essence of creative rational argument, poisoning the students’ enjoyment of this fascinating and beautiful subject, and permanently disabling them from thinking about math in a natural and intuitive way.
I haven’t even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.
To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I’ve noticed that I’m better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can’t say how much of that is “innate” “talent”, with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can’t help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there’s a correlation.
If you naturally like learning, school doesn’t take away the opportunity to continue learning naturally, despite the school assignments. I always studied stuff obsessively, and school/university topics rarely correlated with what I was obsessing about at the time. If, on the other hand, you prefer other extracurricular activities, I doubt the absence of school would likely change your course.
The benefits and attractions Z.M. describes are similar to what attracted me to goal system zero. The following three passages from Z.M.’s comments particularly resonated with me.
when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win.
In other words, all you have to do to win the Game of Life is to play the Game the best you can. (And a big part of that is making sure that none of your deliberations are rationalizations in the service of an unacknowledged agenda.)
I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing.
And it is important to stress that oftentimes the best thing for me to do is to get my mind off of all planning and all tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding on a short time scale, so I can relax and rest. (Actually, there is a whole lot more to “keeping the ape happy” than getting enough relaxation and rest, but relaxation and rest illustrate the general point.)
I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation.
One way Z.M. differs from me during my period of loyalty to goal system zero is that the value I assigned to my life and my self flowed entirely from my usefulness to goal system zero. In other words, I did not assign any intrinsic value to my life or my self. Goal system zero was the only source of intrinsic value I recognized. (Z.M. probably differs from the former version of me in a lot of other ways, too.)
Yvain, did you consider how much getting to the point of not having interest in the opposite sex would cost you and harm your ability to achieve your rational goals before abandoning that high standard? It sounds like you’re confusing accepting your humanness as a factor of your current environment versus trying to achieve your goals given the reality in which you exist (which includes your own psychology and current location).
Can you give us some numbers? How long have you been doing this? What is your average day (better yet: yesterday) like?
I tried something like this when I was very young—middle school, maybe. I think the most embarrassing part was where I decided I would never have any interest in the opposite sex, because that would be a distraction. It lasted for about a week before I decided maybe there was something to this “being human” thing after all, and put it all down to childhood exuberance and never tried anything of that sort again.
...but if you can actually pull it off, you are my new hero.
I don’t actually have any numbers on hand, and to be clear, I don’t claim to have achieved any level of sheer awesomeness, but rather only that I’m a better person than I used to be. (This is by no means a high bar.) You ask, how long have I been doing this—but I can’t point to any discrete start; my personality has been in a sort of gradual flux in what I’ve been calling “these days of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain”—dating back to my nervous breakdown of 29 November 2007.
This was actually sort of my point: life is continuous. When you have a discrete goal, an explicit program with a start date and an end date, you can just fail. Whereas when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win. You seemed to be saying that when you have an open-ended goal, that just gives you an excuse to cheat. Whereas I’m working under the theory that if I want to cheat, I’ve already lost.
All this might tie into why I can’t deal with school: they give you a curriculum, and all the good thoughts you have that aren’t on the curriculum don’t count, and everything that is on the curriculum that you didn’t do is a mark of sin upon your soul, because you have a duty to perfectly obey the teacher’s commands. It’s too precise—arbitrarily precise. I realize that most people probably aren’t like this—somehow they can muddle through the system without being driven to madness by all the little details. Most people have not thrown crying fits contemplating how they got a B in that poetry class, even though they weren’t sure they did all of the reading, and therefore might not have truly deserved that B. Nor is it common, I imagine, to worry about what constitutes a “reading”—they tell you to read the chapter, but what does that mean?---if my eyes skim over a paragraph, do I have to go back and make sure I touch every word? I just want to be good! What do you want from me?!
I tried to obey. I couldn’t. What would constitute obedience is either underspecified or overspecified; I can’t figure out which. I need a different methodology if I am simply going to exist. Explicit rules and goals sum over far too many details. It might help to have handy verbal guidelines and best practices, but ultimately these are only useful if you really care about what you’re doing. And if you really care about what you’re doing, then you can’t be so utterly dependent on the guidelines. “How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.” I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing. But I think I repeat myself.
Did you go to school, did you go to school for a while and then leave, or are you entirely self-taught?
Your method is clearly better if you are able to think like that successfully, and my method is mostly born from the observation that I can’t. I’ve heard it said that one of the effects of spending a decade or two in the school system is that it twists your mind to think more in the way typical of my system and less in the way typical of yours. And I find that people who managed to avoid school almost entirely, like Eliezer, radiate a sort of psychological healthiness I can only dream of.
I had the same feelings about school as you did, my parents refused to let me leave, and I ended out, over a few years, becoming the sort of person who could tolerate the school experience. Sometimes I worry that the process made me less able to do a lot of other things, like strive for excellence in the way you’re describing.
Scott Aaronson writes about A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart.
For example, a quote about school geometry:
I haven’t even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.
To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I’ve noticed that I’m better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can’t say how much of that is “innate” “talent”, with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can’t help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there’s a correlation.
compared to what? evidence?
The Lockhart piece is great and deserves to be much better known. The only bad thing about it is that it pisses the reader off.
Thanks for the link to Aaronson’s commentary; I hadn’t seen it.
It does? I thought it was more heartbreakingly tragic than anything else.
The second; high school diploma and fifty-five credits at UCSC.
If you naturally like learning, school doesn’t take away the opportunity to continue learning naturally, despite the school assignments. I always studied stuff obsessively, and school/university topics rarely correlated with what I was obsessing about at the time. If, on the other hand, you prefer other extracurricular activities, I doubt the absence of school would likely change your course.
The benefits and attractions Z.M. describes are similar to what attracted me to goal system zero. The following three passages from Z.M.’s comments particularly resonated with me.
In other words, all you have to do to win the Game of Life is to play the Game the best you can. (And a big part of that is making sure that none of your deliberations are rationalizations in the service of an unacknowledged agenda.)
And it is important to stress that oftentimes the best thing for me to do is to get my mind off of all planning and all tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding on a short time scale, so I can relax and rest. (Actually, there is a whole lot more to “keeping the ape happy” than getting enough relaxation and rest, but relaxation and rest illustrate the general point.)
One way Z.M. differs from me during my period of loyalty to goal system zero is that the value I assigned to my life and my self flowed entirely from my usefulness to goal system zero. In other words, I did not assign any intrinsic value to my life or my self. Goal system zero was the only source of intrinsic value I recognized. (Z.M. probably differs from the former version of me in a lot of other ways, too.)
Yvain, did you consider how much getting to the point of not having interest in the opposite sex would cost you and harm your ability to achieve your rational goals before abandoning that high standard? It sounds like you’re confusing accepting your humanness as a factor of your current environment versus trying to achieve your goals given the reality in which you exist (which includes your own psychology and current location).