This is the point where I generally part company with a lot of projects of this sort: I am far more interested in gaining clarity about the various segments of my psyche than I am about enforcing one segment’s goals on another segment’s.
I consider self-awareness something worth pursuing for its own sake, for the fun of it; understanding what I am for the sake of changing it into something else seems… odd.
I’m reminded again of my own process of coming out. Sure, Dave the Closeted Bisexual can decide to endorse or repudiate his same-sex attractions, or his opposite-sex attractions, or both, or some other way of slicing the data. But another approach is to accept what is there without trying to change it. In general, I prefer that approach.
I have a similar attitude towards akrasia. Yes, parts of me want to get work done, parts of me want to goof off. The usual framing of this is some version of “How can I effectively endorse the former and repudiate the latter?” My own framing of this is some version of “Well, that’s interesting.”
As another example, about six months ago I started writing a novel. I outlined it in detail and wrote about 50kwords of it, then stopped. Various beta readers of mine described this as “writer’s block” and were full of suggestions for how to overcome it. I described this as “I don’t seem to want to work on this novel any more,” and saw no particular reason to overcome it. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again some day. Perhaps not.
Admittedly, if I became unable to hold down a lucrative job, pursue a rewarding hobby, maintain rewarding personal relationships, etc., I might start feeling differently; it might no longer be acceptable to work on accepting myself as I am without trying to change myself. Then again, I observe that accepting that I am what I am and want what I want and contradict myself where I contradict myself often causes me to be more effective in the world, and I suspect that’s not a coincidence.
I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing this comment, to be honest, beyond that I was thinking about it in response to this post. I’m certainly not disagreeing with any of what you’ve written here… the sort of endorsement/repudiation of well-understood aspects of one’s psyche that you suggest can work very well, and certainly works better than trying to change things one hasn’t yet understood. Nor am I suggesting that my current state is perfect and cannot be improved upon.
I guess I’m just articulating a different perspective. Yes, once you’ve identified what you don’t like about your mind, you can work on changing/improving it, as you say. Alternatively, once you’ve discovered that there are things about your mind you don’t like, you can work on being OK with them, just like you can work on being OK with other people’s minds without changing them.
I’m unsure, but I think that most of what you are talking about is time inconsistency and failure to predict your future goals and desires.
If giving up now makes sense, why did you first write so much? If something changed internally, could you have predicted it and saved yourself time, or prevented it from happening? If that would have accomplished more, saying your current preferences don’t support it is backwards!
If you have goals that are higher priority than your short term preferences, resolving the tension between different desires week make you more effective at achieving those goals. If you write as an outlet, giving up 50k words in is reasonable. If you write to improve your ability to communicate, giving up before finishing limits the feedback you will receive, but may still be a good idea. If you write because you think what you are saying is important or useful to many people, giving up is admitting defeat.
Well, as you say, a lot depends on what the point of writing was in the first place.
If the primary goal was to create a finished novel, then, yes, either I should put work into it and get a novel, or not-put work into it and get no novel, but putting work into it and getting no novel is inefficient. (Of course, that’s not to say my decision procedure was necessarily flawed, even in this case; it might be that I discovered things in the process of writing that changed my decision, that would have kept me from starting had I known them up front, but which I simply could not have known without writing. In which case the answer to “why did I write so much?” is “to improve my ability to predict the value of writing more.” But as you say, it might also be that I could have predicted that up front and saved myself time, and I need a better predictive algorithm.)
On the other hand, as you say, if my primary goal was something else, then maybe writing some of a novel makes sense.
The truth is I’m not entirely sure what my goal was, and wasn’t at the time. I wrote, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I stopped, because writing stopped seeming like the thing to do.
This also reminds me of the idea that if I date someone for a period of time, and we’re happy, and then we stop being happy and break up, that’s a failed relationship that it would have been optimal not to start… as opposed to the idea that it’s a successful relationship that lasted a finite amount of time.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified. Not that I don’t ever do this, but I like to think that it’s a non-endorsed behavior. When I notice myself doing this, I should assess my implicit motives, and try to find what I want, and whether what I’m doing makes sense.
If the goal of a relationship is to be happy and enjoy the time together, it can be successful and short term. If the goal is to find a life-partner, it can’t be successful and short term.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified.
It’s a fair thing to wonder.
In my case, I endorse it within limits because in my experience sometimes the best I seem able to do with respect to some goal X is establish that I do in fact seem to want to do X, that I don’t object to doing X, that doing X doesn’t seem to be causing me any problems, and that my desire to do X is reasonably persistent. When I try to dig “below” that to get at “what other goal, beyond simply doing X for its own sake, does doing X accomplish?” I sometimes get answers, but I often get nothing at all. If I push past that point I’m more likely to confabulate a plausible-sounding answer than discover a real one.
Of course, another option at that point is to give up on X on the grounds that if I can’t articulate the goal of X, then I shouldn’t value that goal (nor, therefore, X) in the first place.
But those grounds seem shaky to me; I haven’t found much evidence to support the idea that only the parts of my brain that are capable of articulating things explicitly store/process/manifest/whatever goals worth pursuing.
That makes sense to me. I think that there are things we can’t articulate that matter, but I generally prefer to work on my ability to articulate them; it probably relays to me conception of Eliezer’s idea of luminosity.
On the other hand, I feel like I might be oversubscribed on goals, making exploration difficult. I don’t know if I have time for general activity that doesn’t further a goal, since I have many that are already high priority.
I have a similar attitude towards akrasia. Yes, parts of me want to get work done, parts of me want to goof off. The usual framing of this is some version of “How can I effectively endorse the former and repudiate the latter?” My own framing of this is some version of “Well, that’s interesting.”
“I am a not-necessarily-coherent bunch of adaptations, and that’s fine.”
(The contradictory drives in my own nature, and the contradictory drives I think I see others exercise around me, lead me to suspect that setting us an irresolvable set of conditions is a prank our genes play on us to get us to propagate them. Coherent personal utility function? You’re ’avin a larf! I also find this hilarious, which I think is the pain of decompartmentalisation.)
And yet, natural selection nevertheless seems to allow for folks like me, in whom the urge to reproduce doesn’t seem especially salient (well, either that, or my genes are profoundly confused about how that’s supposed to work).
So who knows? Perhaps there’s a minority out there with internal coherence, as well.
(nods) Yeah, I figured this was coming.
This is the point where I generally part company with a lot of projects of this sort: I am far more interested in gaining clarity about the various segments of my psyche than I am about enforcing one segment’s goals on another segment’s.
I consider self-awareness something worth pursuing for its own sake, for the fun of it; understanding what I am for the sake of changing it into something else seems… odd.
I’m reminded again of my own process of coming out. Sure, Dave the Closeted Bisexual can decide to endorse or repudiate his same-sex attractions, or his opposite-sex attractions, or both, or some other way of slicing the data. But another approach is to accept what is there without trying to change it. In general, I prefer that approach.
I have a similar attitude towards akrasia. Yes, parts of me want to get work done, parts of me want to goof off. The usual framing of this is some version of “How can I effectively endorse the former and repudiate the latter?” My own framing of this is some version of “Well, that’s interesting.”
As another example, about six months ago I started writing a novel. I outlined it in detail and wrote about 50kwords of it, then stopped. Various beta readers of mine described this as “writer’s block” and were full of suggestions for how to overcome it. I described this as “I don’t seem to want to work on this novel any more,” and saw no particular reason to overcome it. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again some day. Perhaps not.
Admittedly, if I became unable to hold down a lucrative job, pursue a rewarding hobby, maintain rewarding personal relationships, etc., I might start feeling differently; it might no longer be acceptable to work on accepting myself as I am without trying to change myself. Then again, I observe that accepting that I am what I am and want what I want and contradict myself where I contradict myself often causes me to be more effective in the world, and I suspect that’s not a coincidence.
I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing this comment, to be honest, beyond that I was thinking about it in response to this post. I’m certainly not disagreeing with any of what you’ve written here… the sort of endorsement/repudiation of well-understood aspects of one’s psyche that you suggest can work very well, and certainly works better than trying to change things one hasn’t yet understood. Nor am I suggesting that my current state is perfect and cannot be improved upon.
I guess I’m just articulating a different perspective. Yes, once you’ve identified what you don’t like about your mind, you can work on changing/improving it, as you say. Alternatively, once you’ve discovered that there are things about your mind you don’t like, you can work on being OK with them, just like you can work on being OK with other people’s minds without changing them.
I’m unsure, but I think that most of what you are talking about is time inconsistency and failure to predict your future goals and desires.
If giving up now makes sense, why did you first write so much? If something changed internally, could you have predicted it and saved yourself time, or prevented it from happening? If that would have accomplished more, saying your current preferences don’t support it is backwards!
If you have goals that are higher priority than your short term preferences, resolving the tension between different desires week make you more effective at achieving those goals. If you write as an outlet, giving up 50k words in is reasonable. If you write to improve your ability to communicate, giving up before finishing limits the feedback you will receive, but may still be a good idea. If you write because you think what you are saying is important or useful to many people, giving up is admitting defeat.
Well, as you say, a lot depends on what the point of writing was in the first place.
If the primary goal was to create a finished novel, then, yes, either I should put work into it and get a novel, or not-put work into it and get no novel, but putting work into it and getting no novel is inefficient. (Of course, that’s not to say my decision procedure was necessarily flawed, even in this case; it might be that I discovered things in the process of writing that changed my decision, that would have kept me from starting had I known them up front, but which I simply could not have known without writing. In which case the answer to “why did I write so much?” is “to improve my ability to predict the value of writing more.” But as you say, it might also be that I could have predicted that up front and saved myself time, and I need a better predictive algorithm.)
On the other hand, as you say, if my primary goal was something else, then maybe writing some of a novel makes sense.
The truth is I’m not entirely sure what my goal was, and wasn’t at the time. I wrote, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I stopped, because writing stopped seeming like the thing to do.
This also reminds me of the idea that if I date someone for a period of time, and we’re happy, and then we stop being happy and break up, that’s a failed relationship that it would have been optimal not to start… as opposed to the idea that it’s a successful relationship that lasted a finite amount of time.
I’m wondering what the point is of investing significant time in something if you don’t have a goal specified. Not that I don’t ever do this, but I like to think that it’s a non-endorsed behavior. When I notice myself doing this, I should assess my implicit motives, and try to find what I want, and whether what I’m doing makes sense.
If the goal of a relationship is to be happy and enjoy the time together, it can be successful and short term. If the goal is to find a life-partner, it can’t be successful and short term.
Exploration.
It’s a fair thing to wonder.
In my case, I endorse it within limits because in my experience sometimes the best I seem able to do with respect to some goal X is establish that I do in fact seem to want to do X, that I don’t object to doing X, that doing X doesn’t seem to be causing me any problems, and that my desire to do X is reasonably persistent. When I try to dig “below” that to get at “what other goal, beyond simply doing X for its own sake, does doing X accomplish?” I sometimes get answers, but I often get nothing at all. If I push past that point I’m more likely to confabulate a plausible-sounding answer than discover a real one.
Of course, another option at that point is to give up on X on the grounds that if I can’t articulate the goal of X, then I shouldn’t value that goal (nor, therefore, X) in the first place.
But those grounds seem shaky to me; I haven’t found much evidence to support the idea that only the parts of my brain that are capable of articulating things explicitly store/process/manifest/whatever goals worth pursuing.
That makes sense to me. I think that there are things we can’t articulate that matter, but I generally prefer to work on my ability to articulate them; it probably relays to me conception of Eliezer’s idea of luminosity.
On the other hand, I feel like I might be oversubscribed on goals, making exploration difficult. I don’t know if I have time for general activity that doesn’t further a goal, since I have many that are already high priority.
“I am a not-necessarily-coherent bunch of adaptations, and that’s fine.”
(The contradictory drives in my own nature, and the contradictory drives I think I see others exercise around me, lead me to suspect that setting us an irresolvable set of conditions is a prank our genes play on us to get us to propagate them. Coherent personal utility function? You’re ’avin a larf! I also find this hilarious, which I think is the pain of decompartmentalisation.)
Under the principle that systems with resolvable drives don’t propagate their genes as readily?
Under the unverified off-the-top-of-my-head hypothesis, yes :-)
If you can think yourself out of the urge to reproduce, that selects against being able to think that well.
Heh.
And yet, natural selection nevertheless seems to allow for folks like me, in whom the urge to reproduce doesn’t seem especially salient (well, either that, or my genes are profoundly confused about how that’s supposed to work).
So who knows? Perhaps there’s a minority out there with internal coherence, as well.
(The bastards.)