This whole concept is confusing to me. I enjoy Eliezer’s writing because it makes sense and is useful so it becomes part of my identity. I haven’t found as many of his newer posts to be useful so a lower number of them are drafted into my identity. My ‘self’ is largely a collection of ideas and thoughts transmitted to me from other people and I don’t find anything wrong with this. I do hope to produce useful knowledge myself but for right now I am educating myself to that point.
If I find a useful tool lying on the ground then I pick it up and use it, I do not try to recreate the tool from scratch in order to make it ‘mine’, which I feel is a meaningless concept. As long as my beliefs and skills pay for themselves in terms of useful benefits to my life I don’t see the point in throwing them away because they came from someone else. I don’t care who I am and I am not attached to any specific view of my self other than to try to pick the most effective tools to accomplish some core goals and values.
I don’t care who I am and I am not attached to any specific view of my self other than to try to pick the most effective tools to accomplish some core goals and values.
So you regard your ‘core goals and values’ to not be part of your self?
And you’re really implying that you can just pick things about yourself simply as tools to accomplish your goals? I don’t think I’ve ever met a person that can do that. Usually, there are facts about who we are and we need to work very hard to do anything about them.
This whole concept is confusing to me. I enjoy Eliezer’s writing because it makes sense and is useful so it becomes part of my identity. I haven’t found as many of his newer posts to be useful so a lower number of them are drafted into my identity. My ‘self’ is largely a collection of ideas and thoughts transmitted to me from other people and I don’t find anything wrong with this. I do hope to produce useful knowledge myself but for right now I am educating myself to that point.
If I find a useful tool lying on the ground then I pick it up and use it, I do not try to recreate the tool from scratch in order to make it ‘mine’, which I feel is a meaningless concept. As long as my beliefs and skills pay for themselves in terms of useful benefits to my life I don’t see the point in throwing them away because they came from someone else. I don’t care who I am and I am not attached to any specific view of my self other than to try to pick the most effective tools to accomplish some core goals and values.
Then you’re a very odd person.
So you regard your ‘core goals and values’ to not be part of your self?
And you’re really implying that you can just pick things about yourself simply as tools to accomplish your goals? I don’t think I’ve ever met a person that can do that. Usually, there are facts about who we are and we need to work very hard to do anything about them.