I am tentatively adding “induces (hypo)mania?” as something to watch out for with visioning; I will think more about it and be on the lookout as other people try this and report back.
John is one of the least emotional labile people I know and I am very confident visioning does not induce hypomania in him. (I am a former therapist with training in assessing this kind of thing.)
It is of course much more difficult to assess myself accurately, but what I can tell you is that I had one very strong and noticeable mindset shift when I first started visioning and then that settled into something durable and useful. It did not come with a decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, or impulsive decisions.
None of that is to say that the same practice wouldn’t affect others differently and I’ll keep an eye on it.
I suspect John has more practice by now and is in equilibrium with regards to this skill and other skills and had less practice when he lost money on highly leveraged forex trades he mentions in his idea scarcity post. Personally I was aware that I was bottlenecked on knowing what I want so I was looking for munchkin ways of fixing that and now found enough techniques that I noticed I had to slow down and shouldn’t try to go too quickly all at once. I had racing thoughts and decreased need for sleep and made impulsive decisions, but mostly optimized for not very costly ones even when I didn’t know what was going on was pretty typical manic symptoms. People have very different constraints. N=1. Also I read the full post and not just the introduction now and updated that this vision skill is only an important subskill of the thing that got me autocatalytic.
Given your comment, I will correspondingly downgrade my estimate that this is doing that, or maybe I’m pointing at something colloquially similar to hypomania but which actually doesn’t have those downsides. Perhaps I am reading too much into this; I don’t on reflection think HPMOR actually induced clinical hypomania in me. Maybe more like a kind of overconfidence in my own importance? I’m also not sure whether this kind of thing is actually bad or not (HPMOR definitely worsened by epistemics in the short term, in part due to this effect).
I am tentatively adding “induces (hypo)mania?” as something to watch out for with visioning; I will think more about it and be on the lookout as other people try this and report back.
John is one of the least emotional labile people I know and I am very confident visioning does not induce hypomania in him. (I am a former therapist with training in assessing this kind of thing.)
It is of course much more difficult to assess myself accurately, but what I can tell you is that I had one very strong and noticeable mindset shift when I first started visioning and then that settled into something durable and useful. It did not come with a decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, or impulsive decisions.
None of that is to say that the same practice wouldn’t affect others differently and I’ll keep an eye on it.
I suspect John has more practice by now and is in equilibrium with regards to this skill and other skills and had less practice when he lost money on highly leveraged forex trades he mentions in his idea scarcity post. Personally I was aware that I was bottlenecked on knowing what I want so I was looking for munchkin ways of fixing that and now found enough techniques that I noticed I had to slow down and shouldn’t try to go too quickly all at once. I had racing thoughts and decreased need for sleep and made impulsive decisions, but mostly optimized for not very costly ones even when I didn’t know what was going on was pretty typical manic symptoms. People have very different constraints. N=1. Also I read the full post and not just the introduction now and updated that this vision skill is only an important subskill of the thing that got me autocatalytic.
Given your comment, I will correspondingly downgrade my estimate that this is doing that, or maybe I’m pointing at something colloquially similar to hypomania but which actually doesn’t have those downsides. Perhaps I am reading too much into this; I don’t on reflection think HPMOR actually induced clinical hypomania in me. Maybe more like a kind of overconfidence in my own importance? I’m also not sure whether this kind of thing is actually bad or not (HPMOR definitely worsened by epistemics in the short term, in part due to this effect).