Bowing down to authority every time someone tells me not to do something isn’t going to accomplish that.
Not if applied across the board like that, no. At the same time, a child who ignores his parents’ vague warnings about playing in the street is likely to become much weaker or nonexistent for it, not stronger. You have to be able to dismiss people as posers when they lack the wisdom to justify their advice and be able to act on opaque advice from people who see things you don’t. Both exist, and neither blind submission nor blind rebellion make for successful strategies.
An important and often missed aspect of this is that not all good models are easily transferable and therefore not all good advice will be something you can easily understand for yourself. Sometimes, especially when things are complicated (as the psychology of human minds can be), the only thing that can be effectively communicated within the limitations is an opaque “this is bad, stay away”—and in those cases you have no choice but to evaluate the credibility of the person making these claims and decide whether or not this specific “authority” making this specific claim is worth taking seriously even before you can understand the “why” behind it. Whether you want to want to heed or ignore the warnings here is up to you, but keep in mind that there is a right and wrong answer, and that the cost of being wrong in one direction isn’t the same as the other. A good heuristic which I like to go by and which you might want to consider is to refrain from discounting advice until you can pass the intellectual Turing test of the person who is offering it. That way, you can know that when you choose to experiment with things deemed risky, you’re at least doing it informed of the potential risks.
FWIW, I think the best argument against spending effort on tulpas isn’t the risk but just the complete lack of reward relative to doing the same things without spending time and effort on “wrapping paper” which can do nothing but impede. You’re hardware hours limited anyway, and so if your “tulpa” is going to become an expert in chess it will be with eye/hand/brain hours that you could have used becoming an expert in chess yourself. If your tulpa is going to have important wisdom to offer by virtue of holding different perspectives, those perspectives will be generated with brain time you could have used generating those perspectives for yourself. There’s no rule saying people can’t specialize in more than one thing or be more than uni-dimensional, it’s just a question of where you want to spend your limited hours.
I will point out that making a habit of distrusting authorities is what led me to rationality.
Perhaps I have applied that lesson too broadly though, especially on here where people are more reliable. When I read OP’s comment, I automatically assumed that they were having a knee-jerk reaction to something cloaked in mystical language. I was wrong about that.
I think that your heuristic is a good one. It resolves a problem that I’ve noticed lately, where I tend to make mistakes because I think I have a way to improve a situation but I’m missing some piece of information.
And I’ve decided against pursuing tulpamancy. The damaging side effects concern me, even if they’re infrequent, and your best argument pretty much sums up the rest of how I feel. I see now that I was excited about the possibilities of tulpas and failed to apply the same demands for rigor that I would normally apply to such an unusual concept.
I just wanted to say I’m really impressed with your level-headed discussion, your ability to notice your own mistakes, and your willingness to change your mind (not just about pursuing tulpamancy, but also about people’s intentions). I wish you all the best :)
Not if applied across the board like that, no. At the same time, a child who ignores his parents’ vague warnings about playing in the street is likely to become much weaker or nonexistent for it, not stronger. You have to be able to dismiss people as posers when they lack the wisdom to justify their advice and be able to act on opaque advice from people who see things you don’t. Both exist, and neither blind submission nor blind rebellion make for successful strategies.
An important and often missed aspect of this is that not all good models are easily transferable and therefore not all good advice will be something you can easily understand for yourself. Sometimes, especially when things are complicated (as the psychology of human minds can be), the only thing that can be effectively communicated within the limitations is an opaque “this is bad, stay away”—and in those cases you have no choice but to evaluate the credibility of the person making these claims and decide whether or not this specific “authority” making this specific claim is worth taking seriously even before you can understand the “why” behind it. Whether you want to want to heed or ignore the warnings here is up to you, but keep in mind that there is a right and wrong answer, and that the cost of being wrong in one direction isn’t the same as the other. A good heuristic which I like to go by and which you might want to consider is to refrain from discounting advice until you can pass the intellectual Turing test of the person who is offering it. That way, you can know that when you choose to experiment with things deemed risky, you’re at least doing it informed of the potential risks.
FWIW, I think the best argument against spending effort on tulpas isn’t the risk but just the complete lack of reward relative to doing the same things without spending time and effort on “wrapping paper” which can do nothing but impede. You’re hardware hours limited anyway, and so if your “tulpa” is going to become an expert in chess it will be with eye/hand/brain hours that you could have used becoming an expert in chess yourself. If your tulpa is going to have important wisdom to offer by virtue of holding different perspectives, those perspectives will be generated with brain time you could have used generating those perspectives for yourself. There’s no rule saying people can’t specialize in more than one thing or be more than uni-dimensional, it’s just a question of where you want to spend your limited hours.
I will point out that making a habit of distrusting authorities is what led me to rationality.
Perhaps I have applied that lesson too broadly though, especially on here where people are more reliable. When I read OP’s comment, I automatically assumed that they were having a knee-jerk reaction to something cloaked in mystical language. I was wrong about that.
I think that your heuristic is a good one. It resolves a problem that I’ve noticed lately, where I tend to make mistakes because I think I have a way to improve a situation but I’m missing some piece of information.
And I’ve decided against pursuing tulpamancy. The damaging side effects concern me, even if they’re infrequent, and your best argument pretty much sums up the rest of how I feel. I see now that I was excited about the possibilities of tulpas and failed to apply the same demands for rigor that I would normally apply to such an unusual concept.
I just wanted to say I’m really impressed with your level-headed discussion, your ability to notice your own mistakes, and your willingness to change your mind (not just about pursuing tulpamancy, but also about people’s intentions). I wish you all the best :)