After having read your response to haig, I still have trouble understanding how to avoid his/her “existential angst/analysis paralysis” problem. As you recommend doing, I started trying to understand the universe as a teen, in order to more effectively pursue my interests. This part has always been natural to me. But as I gradually learned during this pursuit—and in large part thinks to this very site—I’m a part of the universe that’s very relevant to me, so I should be trying to model myself accurately.
This makes very much sense and seems to be a common realization among thoughtful humans: If my goal is to become happy (let’s say in a fairly Aristotelian sense of the word), then deciding what sort of person to become in the first place becomes a very important question to answer correctly. Should I be habituating myself to be one of these ‘go-getters’? Or to sitting on top of a mountain and entertaining visitors with mystical-sounding wise-cracks? We’re right to wonder whether people should spend more than five minutes determining what to study at university, or which career to start. This seems even more important—one level of action higher still.
LW offers two partial antidotes to this conundrum: I can rest assured that whatever I do, It’ll be in the pursuit of status within my community. This modest bit of biological determinism is convincing, and actually helps. I’m also convinced that the kind of status-raising activities I pursue should be of the genuine do-gooding variety (that is to say it should follow a consequentialist sort of calculus). But this fall far short of constraining the problem: I feel—and in large part because of the literature I’ve read here at LW—that I’m so able to redesign many of my own desires in the first place. This community has done so much to make me aware that so many of my interests and so much of my self-model are very socially contingent, and because of this so much of my own personality is available for re-design. Such openness of possibilities at such high levels of action really do seem to motivate questions like Haig’s question very strongly. “Who should I be? Which of them will be best?
Anna,
After having read your response to haig, I still have trouble understanding how to avoid his/her “existential angst/analysis paralysis” problem. As you recommend doing, I started trying to understand the universe as a teen, in order to more effectively pursue my interests. This part has always been natural to me. But as I gradually learned during this pursuit—and in large part thinks to this very site—I’m a part of the universe that’s very relevant to me, so I should be trying to model myself accurately.
This makes very much sense and seems to be a common realization among thoughtful humans: If my goal is to become happy (let’s say in a fairly Aristotelian sense of the word), then deciding what sort of person to become in the first place becomes a very important question to answer correctly. Should I be habituating myself to be one of these ‘go-getters’? Or to sitting on top of a mountain and entertaining visitors with mystical-sounding wise-cracks? We’re right to wonder whether people should spend more than five minutes determining what to study at university, or which career to start. This seems even more important—one level of action higher still.
LW offers two partial antidotes to this conundrum: I can rest assured that whatever I do, It’ll be in the pursuit of status within my community. This modest bit of biological determinism is convincing, and actually helps. I’m also convinced that the kind of status-raising activities I pursue should be of the genuine do-gooding variety (that is to say it should follow a consequentialist sort of calculus). But this fall far short of constraining the problem: I feel—and in large part because of the literature I’ve read here at LW—that I’m so able to redesign many of my own desires in the first place. This community has done so much to make me aware that so many of my interests and so much of my self-model are very socially contingent, and because of this so much of my own personality is available for re-design. Such openness of possibilities at such high levels of action really do seem to motivate questions like Haig’s question very strongly. “Who should I be? Which of them will be best?