I don’t think I’m lacking self-love. Rather, my self-love is decidedly not unconditional. I am in fact quite competent and have achieved quite a lot (even if I’m still far from my own goals), and I love and respect myself for that. Insofar as I imagine myself a worse or weaker person, I have less love and respect for that person, and that seems straightforwardly correct.
Yeah, this is something my model of you would have said, and I also might have said something like this about myself until recently.
Your method of relating-to-yourself can work for motivation and I know there are lots of very successful people who use it. But it seems to have serious disadvantages, certainly for personal happiness (although, probably like you, I would endorse sacrificing much of my own happiness to increase the odds of solving AI alignment if I thought that was a trade I could make). I suppose I don’t have enough experience to know whether positive self-talk will actually increase my productivity, but surely it’s at least worth an experiment, and I actually feel quite optimistic about it. If it doesn’t work, I suppose I can always return to the daily self-beatings.
Idk why my comment is so downvoted right now, I think my model of self-motivation is similar to what Nate Soares writes in Replacing Guilt. Perhaps not the touchy-feely part about self-love, it’s been a while since I read it
There’s a handful of people who just really hate on woo-ish things in general. Personally I try to push mildly in the opposite direction to compensate.
Interesting, I really enjoyed Replacing Guilt, but if anything it made me more more willing/able/fine-with experiencing a disquiet or deep disappointment at other’s actions. It made the ways to improve more obvious while helping to detach it from guilt-based motivation.
I was still, as John phrases it, having conditional self-love but it was less short-term and less based around guilt, but still about reaching-farther and doing-more.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this way of looking at things.
Serious question—how do you calibrate the standard by which you judge that something is good enough to warrant respect, or self-respect?
To illustrate what I mean, in one of your examples you judge your project teammates negatively for not having had the broad awareness to seriously learn ML ahead of time, in the absence of other obvious external stimuli to do so (like classes that would be hard enough to actually require that). The root of the negative judgment is that a better objective didn’t occur to them.
How can you ever be sure that there isn’t a better objective that isn’t occurring to you, at any given time? More broadly, how can you be sure that there isn’t just a generally better way of living, that you’re messing up for not currently doing?
If, hypothetically, you encountered a better version of yourself that presented you with a better objective and ways of living better, would you retroactively judge your life up to the present moment as worse and less worthy of respect? (Perhaps, based on the answer to the previous problem, the answer is “yes”, but you think this is an unlikely scenario.)
It’s not that conscious/reflective. Respect is an emotion; my standards for it are more on the instinctive level. Which is not to say that there aren’t consistent standards there, but they’re not something I have easy direct control over or ready introspective access to.
I don’t think I’m lacking self-love. Rather, my self-love is decidedly not unconditional. I am in fact quite competent and have achieved quite a lot (even if I’m still far from my own goals), and I love and respect myself for that. Insofar as I imagine myself a worse or weaker person, I have less love and respect for that person, and that seems straightforwardly correct.
Yeah, this is something my model of you would have said, and I also might have said something like this about myself until recently.
Your method of relating-to-yourself can work for motivation and I know there are lots of very successful people who use it. But it seems to have serious disadvantages, certainly for personal happiness (although, probably like you, I would endorse sacrificing much of my own happiness to increase the odds of solving AI alignment if I thought that was a trade I could make). I suppose I don’t have enough experience to know whether positive self-talk will actually increase my productivity, but surely it’s at least worth an experiment, and I actually feel quite optimistic about it. If it doesn’t work, I suppose I can always return to the daily self-beatings.
Idk why my comment is so downvoted right now, I think my model of self-motivation is similar to what Nate Soares writes in Replacing Guilt. Perhaps not the touchy-feely part about self-love, it’s been a while since I read it
There’s a handful of people who just really hate on woo-ish things in general. Personally I try to push mildly in the opposite direction to compensate.
Interesting, I really enjoyed Replacing Guilt, but if anything it made me more more willing/able/fine-with experiencing a disquiet or deep disappointment at other’s actions. It made the ways to improve more obvious while helping to detach it from guilt-based motivation. I was still, as John phrases it, having conditional self-love but it was less short-term and less based around guilt, but still about reaching-farther and doing-more.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this way of looking at things.
Serious question—how do you calibrate the standard by which you judge that something is good enough to warrant respect, or self-respect?
To illustrate what I mean, in one of your examples you judge your project teammates negatively for not having had the broad awareness to seriously learn ML ahead of time, in the absence of other obvious external stimuli to do so (like classes that would be hard enough to actually require that). The root of the negative judgment is that a better objective didn’t occur to them.
How can you ever be sure that there isn’t a better objective that isn’t occurring to you, at any given time? More broadly, how can you be sure that there isn’t just a generally better way of living, that you’re messing up for not currently doing?
If, hypothetically, you encountered a better version of yourself that presented you with a better objective and ways of living better, would you retroactively judge your life up to the present moment as worse and less worthy of respect? (Perhaps, based on the answer to the previous problem, the answer is “yes”, but you think this is an unlikely scenario.)
It’s not that conscious/reflective. Respect is an emotion; my standards for it are more on the instinctive level. Which is not to say that there aren’t consistent standards there, but they’re not something I have easy direct control over or ready introspective access to.