I experienced a bunch of those disorientation patterns during my university years. For example:
I would only spend time with people who cared about x-risk as well, because other people seemed unimportant and dull, and I thought I wouldn’t want to be close to them in the long run. I would choose to spend time with people even if I didn’t connect with very much, hoping that opportunities to do useful things would show up (most of the time they didn’t). And yet I wasn’t able to hang out with these people. I went through maybe a 6 month period where when I met up with someone, the first thing I’d do was list out like 10-15 topics we could discuss, and try to figure out which were the most useful to talk about and in what order we should talk. I definitely also turned many of these people off hanging out with me because it was so taxing. I was confused about this at the time. I though I was not doing it well enough or something, because I wasn’t providing enough value to them such that they were clearly having a good time.
I became very uninterested in talking with people whose words didn’t cache out into a gears level model of the situation based in things I could independently confirm or understand. I went through a long period of not being able to talk to my mum about politics at all. She’s very opinionated and has a lot of tribal feelings and affiliations, and seemed to me to not be thinking about it in the way I wanted to think about it, which was a more first-principles fashion. Nowadays I find it interesting to put engage with how she sees the world, argue with it, feel what she feels. It’s not the “truth” that I wanted, I can’t take in the explicit content of her words and just input them into my beliefs, but this isn’t the only way to learn from her. She has a substantive perspective on human coordination, that’s tied up with important parts of her character and life story, that a lot of people share.
Relatedly, I went through a period of not being able to engage with aphorisms or short phrases that sounded insightful. Now I feel more trusting of my taste in what things mean and which things to take with me.
I generally wasn’t able to connect with my family about what I cared about in life / in the big picture. I’d always try to be open and honest, and so I’d say something like “I think the world might end and I should do something about it” and they’d think that sounded mad and just ignore it. My Dad would talk about how he just cares that I’m happy. Nowadays I realise we have a lot of shared reference points for people who do things, not because they make you happy or because they help you be socially secure, but because they’re right, because they’re meaningful and fulfilling, and because it feels like it’s your purpose. And they get that, and they know they make decisions like that, and they understand me when I talk about my decisions through that frame.
I remember on my 20th birthday, I had 10 of my friends round and gave a half-hour power-point presentation on my life plan. Their feedback wasn’t that useful, but I realised like a week later, that the talk only contained info about how to evaluate whether a plan was good, and not how to generate plans to be evaluated. I’d just picked the one thing that people talked about that sounded okay under my evaluation process (publishing papers in ML, which was a terrible choice for me, I interacted very badly with academia). It took me a week to notice that I’d not said how to come up with plans. I then realised that I’d been thinking in a very narrow and evaluative way, and not been open to exploring interesting ideas before I could evaluate whether they worked.
I should say, these shifts have not been anything like an unmitigated failure. I think the whole process was totally worth it, and not just because they caused me to be more socially connected to x-risk people, or because they were worth it in some pascal’s mugging kind of way. Like, riffing off that last example, the birthday party was followed by us doing a bunch of other things I really liked—my friends and I read a bunch of dialogues from GEB after that (the voices people did were very funny) and ate cake, and I remember it fondly. The whole event was slightly outside my comfort zone, but everyone had a great time, and it was also in the general pattern of me trying to more explicitly optimise for what I cared about. A bunch of the stuff above has lead me to form the strongest friendships I had, much stronger than I think I expected I could have. And many other things I won’t detail here.
Overall the effects on me personally, on my general fulfilment and happiness and connection to people I care about, has been strongly positive, and I’m glad about this. I take more small social risks, and they pay off in large ways. I’m better at getting what I want, getting sh*t done, etc. Here, I’m mostly just listing some of the awkward things I did while at university.
I should say, these shifts have not been anything like an unmitigated failure, and I don’t now believe were worth it just because they caused me to be more socially connected to x-risk things.
Had a little trouble parsing this, especially the second half. Here’s my attempted paraphrase:
I take you to be saying that: 1) the shifts that resulted from engaging with x-risk were not all bad, despite leading to the disorienting events listed above, and 2) in particular, you think the shifts were (partially) beneficial for reasons other than just that they led you to be more socially connected to x-risk people.
Engaging with CFAR and LW’s ideas about redesigning my mind and focusing on important goals for humanity (e.g. x-risk reduction), has primarily—not partially—majorly improved my general competence, and how meaningful my life is. I’m a much better person, more honest and true, because of it. It directly made my life better, not just my abstract beliefs about the future.
The difficulties above were transitional problems, not the main effects.
Hm, what caused them? I’m not sure exactly, but I will riff on it for a bit anyway.
Why was I uninterested in hanging out with most people? There was something I cared about quite deeply, and it felt feasible that I could get it, but it seemed transparent that these people couldn’t recognise it or help me get it and I was just humouring them to pretend otherwise. I felt kinda lost at sea, and so trying to understand and really integrate others’ worldviews when my own felt unstable was… it felt like failure. Nowadays I feel stable in my ability to think and figure out what I believe about the world, and so I’m able to use other people as valuable hypothesis generation, and play with ideas together safely. I feel comfortable adding ideas to my wheelhouse that aren’t perfectly vetted, because I trust overall I’m heading in a good direction and will be able to recognise their issues later.
I think that giving friends a life-presentation and then later noticing a clear hole in it felt really good, it felt like thinking for myself, putting in work, and getting out some real self-knowledge about my own cognitive processes. I think that gave me more confidence to interact with others’ ideas and yet trust I’d stay on the right track. I think writing my ideas down into blogposts also helped a lot with this.
Generally building up an understanding of the world that seemed to actually be right, and work for making stuff, and people I respected trusted, helped a lot.
That’s what I got right now.
Oh, there was another key thing tied up with the above: feeling like I was in control of my future. I was terrible at being a ‘good student’, yet I thought that my career depended on doing well at university. This lead to a lot of motivated reasoning and a perpetual fear that made it hard to explore, and gave me a lot of tunnel vision throughout my life at the time. Only when I realised I could get work that didn’t rely on good grades at university, but instead on trust I had built in the rationality and EA networks, and I could do things I cared about like work on LessWrong, did I feel more relaxed about considering exploring other big changes I wanted in how I lived my life, and doing things I enjoyed.
A lot of these worries felt like I was waiting to fix a problem—a problem whose solution I could reach, at least in principle—and then the worry would go away. This is why I said ‘transitional’. I felt like the problems could be overcome.
I experienced a bunch of those disorientation patterns during my university years. For example:
I would only spend time with people who cared about x-risk as well, because other people seemed unimportant and dull, and I thought I wouldn’t want to be close to them in the long run. I would choose to spend time with people even if I didn’t connect with very much, hoping that opportunities to do useful things would show up (most of the time they didn’t). And yet I wasn’t able to hang out with these people. I went through maybe a 6 month period where when I met up with someone, the first thing I’d do was list out like 10-15 topics we could discuss, and try to figure out which were the most useful to talk about and in what order we should talk. I definitely also turned many of these people off hanging out with me because it was so taxing. I was confused about this at the time. I though I was not doing it well enough or something, because I wasn’t providing enough value to them such that they were clearly having a good time.
I became very uninterested in talking with people whose words didn’t cache out into a gears level model of the situation based in things I could independently confirm or understand. I went through a long period of not being able to talk to my mum about politics at all. She’s very opinionated and has a lot of tribal feelings and affiliations, and seemed to me to not be thinking about it in the way I wanted to think about it, which was a more first-principles fashion. Nowadays I find it interesting to put engage with how she sees the world, argue with it, feel what she feels. It’s not the “truth” that I wanted, I can’t take in the explicit content of her words and just input them into my beliefs, but this isn’t the only way to learn from her. She has a substantive perspective on human coordination, that’s tied up with important parts of her character and life story, that a lot of people share.
Relatedly, I went through a period of not being able to engage with aphorisms or short phrases that sounded insightful. Now I feel more trusting of my taste in what things mean and which things to take with me.
I generally wasn’t able to connect with my family about what I cared about in life / in the big picture. I’d always try to be open and honest, and so I’d say something like “I think the world might end and I should do something about it” and they’d think that sounded mad and just ignore it. My Dad would talk about how he just cares that I’m happy. Nowadays I realise we have a lot of shared reference points for people who do things, not because they make you happy or because they help you be socially secure, but because they’re right, because they’re meaningful and fulfilling, and because it feels like it’s your purpose. And they get that, and they know they make decisions like that, and they understand me when I talk about my decisions through that frame.
I remember on my 20th birthday, I had 10 of my friends round and gave a half-hour power-point presentation on my life plan. Their feedback wasn’t that useful, but I realised like a week later, that the talk only contained info about how to evaluate whether a plan was good, and not how to generate plans to be evaluated. I’d just picked the one thing that people talked about that sounded okay under my evaluation process (publishing papers in ML, which was a terrible choice for me, I interacted very badly with academia). It took me a week to notice that I’d not said how to come up with plans. I then realised that I’d been thinking in a very narrow and evaluative way, and not been open to exploring interesting ideas before I could evaluate whether they worked.
I should say, these shifts have not been anything like an unmitigated failure. I think the whole process was totally worth it, and not just because they caused me to be more socially connected to x-risk people, or because they were worth it in some pascal’s mugging kind of way. Like, riffing off that last example, the birthday party was followed by us doing a bunch of other things I really liked—my friends and I read a bunch of dialogues from GEB after that (the voices people did were very funny) and ate cake, and I remember it fondly. The whole event was slightly outside my comfort zone, but everyone had a great time, and it was also in the general pattern of me trying to more explicitly optimise for what I cared about. A bunch of the stuff above has lead me to form the strongest friendships I had, much stronger than I think I expected I could have. And many other things I won’t detail here.
Overall the effects on me personally, on my general fulfilment and happiness and connection to people I care about, has been strongly positive, and I’m glad about this. I take more small social risks, and they pay off in large ways. I’m better at getting what I want, getting sh*t done, etc. Here, I’m mostly just listing some of the awkward things I did while at university.
Had a little trouble parsing this, especially the second half. Here’s my attempted paraphrase:
I take you to be saying that: 1) the shifts that resulted from engaging with x-risk were not all bad, despite leading to the disorienting events listed above, and 2) in particular, you think the shifts were (partially) beneficial for reasons other than just that they led you to be more socially connected to x-risk people.
Is that right?
That’s close.
Engaging with CFAR and LW’s ideas about redesigning my mind and focusing on important goals for humanity (e.g. x-risk reduction), has primarily—not partially—majorly improved my general competence, and how meaningful my life is. I’m a much better person, more honest and true, because of it. It directly made my life better, not just my abstract beliefs about the future.
The difficulties above were transitional problems, not the main effects.
Why do you say they were “transitional”? Do you have a notion of what exactly caused them?
Hm, what caused them? I’m not sure exactly, but I will riff on it for a bit anyway.
Why was I uninterested in hanging out with most people? There was something I cared about quite deeply, and it felt feasible that I could get it, but it seemed transparent that these people couldn’t recognise it or help me get it and I was just humouring them to pretend otherwise. I felt kinda lost at sea, and so trying to understand and really integrate others’ worldviews when my own felt unstable was… it felt like failure. Nowadays I feel stable in my ability to think and figure out what I believe about the world, and so I’m able to use other people as valuable hypothesis generation, and play with ideas together safely. I feel comfortable adding ideas to my wheelhouse that aren’t perfectly vetted, because I trust overall I’m heading in a good direction and will be able to recognise their issues later.
I think that giving friends a life-presentation and then later noticing a clear hole in it felt really good, it felt like thinking for myself, putting in work, and getting out some real self-knowledge about my own cognitive processes. I think that gave me more confidence to interact with others’ ideas and yet trust I’d stay on the right track. I think writing my ideas down into blogposts also helped a lot with this.
Generally building up an understanding of the world that seemed to actually be right, and work for making stuff, and people I respected trusted, helped a lot.
That’s what I got right now.
Oh, there was another key thing tied up with the above: feeling like I was in control of my future. I was terrible at being a ‘good student’, yet I thought that my career depended on doing well at university. This lead to a lot of motivated reasoning and a perpetual fear that made it hard to explore, and gave me a lot of tunnel vision throughout my life at the time. Only when I realised I could get work that didn’t rely on good grades at university, but instead on trust I had built in the rationality and EA networks, and I could do things I cared about like work on LessWrong, did I feel more relaxed about considering exploring other big changes I wanted in how I lived my life, and doing things I enjoyed.
A lot of these worries felt like I was waiting to fix a problem—a problem whose solution I could reach, at least in principle—and then the worry would go away. This is why I said ‘transitional’. I felt like the problems could be overcome.