In the podcast between Spencer Greenberg and Buck Shlegeris, Taking pleasure in being wrong, Buck says:
I think that when you are learning subjects something that you should really be taken your eye out for is the simplest question in the field that you don’t know the answer to.
I think a lot of the time people try to learn physics or something and their approach is as quickly as possible to answer hard questions about complicated subjects. And I think that’s what I thought was cool when I was younger. They delighted at questions that were at the limit of fanciness that they could possibly answer and it feels to me now that it is a lot more productive to seek out questions that are as simple sounding as possible while still being really hard to answer. Or that still demonstrate that there’s something you don’t understand about the subject.
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It seems like we should be seeking out these most basic questions in the hope of finding holes in the foundation of our knowledge.
If we apply that approach to applied rationality, what questions do you have that seem to be simple but where you don’t know the answer?
Why can’t those rare hours of back-to-back inspiration happen on command?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534755.A_Technique_for_Producing_Ideas?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=FeFvMKus2k&rank=1
+ Incorporating understanding of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
+ Drugs
If you’re willing to accept ‘on command’ as, ‘something I spend days/weeks intentionally preparing/cultivating’ then it seems like you’re in luck.
Sorry if this is all old news; not what you were looking for.
What is good? What is bad? Is suffering bad? Is pleasure good?
Rationality works well when there is a clear cut utility function, but what utility function is the good one?
Instrumental rationality is fairly easy to define when it’s about optimising your own UF. You seem to have the worry that optimising your own UF isn’t what you should be doing given the default meaning of “should”. Which is fair enough.
In a naive conception, a lot of people have a utility function that values the pleasure of eating highly sugared food and not eating a lot of green vegetables.
Self-modifying in a way that you get more pleasure from eating more healthy food seems naively useful but it’s changing the utility function. It’s unclear to what extent it makes sense to do things that do shift one’s utility function.
“I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it i’d eat it, and I hate it.”
Every new experience may change your preferences. Seeking out new experiences will predictably have this effect. Openness to experience requires openness to seeing your preferences changing, even if you do not know in what direction. This has been going on since birth, as no-one is born with the preferences they will have as adults. There is a process by which they develop, which does not, or at least need not, stop on reaching adulthood.
Yes, experiences change preferences. This process is however not just random but can be guided. The question of how that process of changing the utility function can be addressed rationally is open.
What utility function? There isn’t one answer, and I’m not certain it really is a function since different values within it may be incommensurable. It isn’t the easy question, it’s the impossible one. More concretely, what utility function should you use? Yours. Don’t know what it is? Find out. The necessary introspection is actual incredibly difficult, error prone, and full of special cases, so, good luck. Personally, I’d look into the values and virtues you truly hold dear, rather than utilities per se. (That does make the math not as useful, so you’ll have to train your intuition for it.)
Is suffering bad? According to most people, including me, yes, but it is hardly the most important thing. Many people’s utility function (still including me) says people should be willing to undergo extreme torture to save the people they truly love from lesser, but still bad, torture.
Is pleasure good? Sure, I prefer it, as do most people, but I’m fully anti-wireheading.
I see suffering and pleasure as simple, but useful proxies for the actual goodness of the state of the world according to that agent. Like any proxy, focusing too hard on the proxy itself (Goodharting) causes the proxy to no longer be useful as it stops representing that which it is a proxy of.
Who has a life I would want? What proxy measures are least goodharted? Where can I find them and how can I learn from them?
Where can I live that would have the highest quality of life? What data can I gather beyond summary statistics? How are the summary statistics biased?
How can I save money for the future given high uncertainty about socio-political volatility over the next 40 years?
How can I find good data about the vast work life balance deltas between people, sometimes even in the same field?
What sort of people should I pursue for friendships and romance? What factors predict the things I care about in relationship?
Should I consider moving or making other large scale lifestyle adjustments for consideration X? Where is predictive accuracy good and bad here?
Will my preferences change in any easy to predict ways given certain things happening? Can I reach reflective equilibrium faster?
How malleable are my own preferences and values? Where does this warrant caution and opportunity?
What is the expects benefit of each additional hour of sleep? What is the QALY cost of a mattress as it ages?
(Apologies in advance if any/all of this is obvious to you)
Too much sleep is bad, too little sleep is bad. Sleep needs vary per person and throughout life but generally >6 hours, <9 hours is the range.
You don’t really sleep in ‘hours’, you sleep in cycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle) so measuring based on hours doesn’t work so much.
If you wake up naturally sometime in that 6-9 hour window, and you sleep deeply through the night (smartwatches are good at measuring this), you’re probably getting enough sleep.
If you have reason to be concerned about your sleep, consider getting a sleep study done.
The benefits of more sleep are less relevant than the downsides of not enough sleep—chronic sleep deprivation is very, very bad.
If your mattress is noticeably uncomfortable, it sounds like you need a new mattress :)