As of writing, I have spent about four months experimenting with the Tune Your Cognitive Strategies (TYCS) method and I haven’t gotten any visible direct benefits out of it.
Some of the indirect benefits I’ve gotten:
I discovered introspective ability and used that to get more insight about what is going on in my mind
I found out about the cluster of integration / parts-work based therapy techniques (such as Internal Family Systems), and have fixed some issues in the way I do things (eg. procrastinating on cleaning up my desk), and have also unraveled some deep issues I noticed (due to better introspective ability)
EY: Your annual reminder that you don’t need to resolve your issues, you don’t need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don’t need to process your trauma, you don’t need to confront your past, you don’t need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.
On one hand, you could try to use TYCS or Eliezer’s method to reduce the cognitive work required to think about something. On the other hand, you could try to use integration-based methods to solve what I would consider ‘fundamental issues’ or deeper issues. The latter feels like focusing on the cognitive equivalent of crucial considerations, the the former feels like incremental improvements.
And well, Eliezer has seemed to be depressed for quite a while now, and Maia Pasek killed herself. Both of these things I notice seem like evidence for my hypothesis that investing in incremental optimization of the sort that is involved in TYCS and Eliezer’s method seems less valuable than the fundamental debugging that is involved in integration / parts-work mental techniques, given scarce cognitive resources.
For the near future, I plan to experiment with and use parts-work mental techniques, and will pause my experimentation and exploration of TYCS and TYCS-like techniques. I expect that there may be a point at which one has a sufficiently integrated mind such that they can switch to mainly investing in TYCS-like techniques, which means I’ll resume looking into these techniques in the future.
If you are willing to share, can you say more about what got you into this line of investigation, and what you were hoping to get out of it?
For my part, I don’t feel like I have many issues/baggage/trauma, so while some of the “fundamental debugging” techniques discussed around here (like IFS or meditation) seem kind of interesting, I don’t feel too compelled to dive in. Whereas, techniques like TYCS or jhana meditation seem more intriguing, as potential “power ups” from a baseline-fine state.
So I’m wondering if your baseline is more like mine, and you ended up finding fundamental debugging valuable anyway.
I’m not mesaoptimizer, but, fyi my case is “I totally didn’t find IFS type stuff very useful for years, and the one day I just suddenly needed it, or at least found myself shaped very differently such that it felt promising.” (see My “2.9 trauma limit”)
If you are willing to share, can you say more about what got you into this line of investigation, and what you were hoping to get out of it?
Burnt out after almost an year of focusing on alignment research. I wanted to take a break from alignment-ey stuff and also desired to systematically fix the root causes behind the fact that I hit what I considered burn-out.
I don’t feel like I have many issues/baggage/trauma
I felt similar when I began this, and my motivation was not to ‘fix issues’ in myself but more “hey I have explicitly decided to take a break and have fun and TYCS seems interesting let’s experiment with it for a while, I can afford to do so”.
As of writing, I have spent about four months experimenting with the Tune Your Cognitive Strategies (TYCS) method and I haven’t gotten any visible direct benefits out of it.
Some of the indirect benefits I’ve gotten:
I discovered introspective ability and used that to get more insight about what is going on in my mind
I found out about the cluster of integration / parts-work based therapy techniques (such as Internal Family Systems), and have fixed some issues in the way I do things (eg. procrastinating on cleaning up my desk), and have also unraveled some deep issues I noticed (due to better introspective ability)
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that better introspective ability and awareness seems to be the most load-bearing skill underlying TYCS. I’m less enthusiastic about the notion that you can ‘notice your cognitive deltas’ in real-time almost all the time—this seems quite costly.
Note that Eliezer has also described that he does something similar. And more interestingly, it seems like Eliezer prefers to invest in what I would call ‘incremental optimization of thought’ over ‘fundamental debugging’:
On one hand, you could try to use TYCS or Eliezer’s method to reduce the cognitive work required to think about something. On the other hand, you could try to use integration-based methods to solve what I would consider ‘fundamental issues’ or deeper issues. The latter feels like focusing on the cognitive equivalent of crucial considerations, the the former feels like incremental improvements.
And well, Eliezer has seemed to be depressed for quite a while now, and Maia Pasek killed herself. Both of these things I notice seem like evidence for my hypothesis that investing in incremental optimization of the sort that is involved in TYCS and Eliezer’s method seems less valuable than the fundamental debugging that is involved in integration / parts-work mental techniques, given scarce cognitive resources.
For the near future, I plan to experiment with and use parts-work mental techniques, and will pause my experimentation and exploration of TYCS and TYCS-like techniques. I expect that there may be a point at which one has a sufficiently integrated mind such that they can switch to mainly investing in TYCS-like techniques, which means I’ll resume looking into these techniques in the future.
If you are willing to share, can you say more about what got you into this line of investigation, and what you were hoping to get out of it?
For my part, I don’t feel like I have many issues/baggage/trauma, so while some of the “fundamental debugging” techniques discussed around here (like IFS or meditation) seem kind of interesting, I don’t feel too compelled to dive in. Whereas, techniques like TYCS or jhana meditation seem more intriguing, as potential “power ups” from a baseline-fine state.
So I’m wondering if your baseline is more like mine, and you ended up finding fundamental debugging valuable anyway.
I’m not mesaoptimizer, but, fyi my case is “I totally didn’t find IFS type stuff very useful for years, and the one day I just suddenly needed it, or at least found myself shaped very differently such that it felt promising.” (see My “2.9 trauma limit”)
Burnt out after almost an year of focusing on alignment research. I wanted to take a break from alignment-ey stuff and also desired to systematically fix the root causes behind the fact that I hit what I considered burn-out.
I felt similar when I began this, and my motivation was not to ‘fix issues’ in myself but more “hey I have explicitly decided to take a break and have fun and TYCS seems interesting let’s experiment with it for a while, I can afford to do so”.