I see people who lack that attitude, who don’t even really want to grow stronger, and when empathy causes the suspension of disbelief to drop… that’s when I feel disgust or disappointment in my so-called fellow humans. Because if I were in their shoes, I would feel disgust or disappointment in myself.
I felt sad when reading this. I would argue that this is not the best mindset for your personal productivity, and almost certainly not for your happiness. I think it would better to practice empathy/love for yourself.
Yes, sorry, you’ve heard the “self-love” thing a million times, it sounds so trite by now, that paragraph contained no new information. Rather than a full argument, I will give you an example.
When I was about to write this comment, I felt a twinge of guilt, like “this comment might take me a while to write, I should get back to work instead.”
Previously, I might have been unable to face this feeling fully. Paraphrasing my subverbal mental motions: “If I really think about whether I want to write this comment or get to work, and come down on the side of writing the comment, I’ll be disgusted by how lazy I am! That’s scary and unpleasant. But I really want to write a comment, and if I let myself really consider it, it might not happen because my System 2 strongly prioritizes productivity. The only way to get what I want here is to pretend I don’t see my guilt and start writing.”
But now, I have a mindset that “regardless of what I do, I just really genuinely love myself. Sometimes I will do things that are bad by my own lights, but I will fundamentally be okay even if this happens.”
This gave me some breathing room and unlocked the option to actually think about this. I love that I want to improve the world by doing work! I love that I want to improve the world by writing this comment! What’s the best solution to make myself as fully satisfied as possible?
I determined that I should try to limit the scope of the comment to this one part of your post, without commenting much on the rest of it. Otherwise, I might have written an even longer comment explaining my take on everything in this whole post instead of just this one piece of it, which would have taken even more time. Not only did I have the mental resources to come up with a decent compromise, I felt way better about it afterwards.
This comment still took way longer than I wanted it to, but instead of beating myself up, I am calmly factoring this into my model of myself, hopefully letting me make better choices in the future. Without the constant background noise of guilt, I feel like I can come up with more strategies, e.g. outlining the exact structure of my future comments before I start so they don’t sprawl as much. But regardless, I feel genuine gratitude for the part of myself that wanted to write this comment, especially since I think it turned out to be a good comment that accords with my values in many ways.
To the rest of your post, I will just say that loving-kindness/metta (closely adjacent to “empathy”) feels amazing and when I am feeling it I feel that I am fundamentally closer to the kind of person I’d like to be. I was not really able to access this emotion, or internalize the mindset described in this comment, until I went on a Jhourney meditation retreat last week. I’ll keep the shilling brief: I would recommend them extremely highly.
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 felt sad when reading this. I would argue that this is not the best mindset for your personal productivity, and almost certainly not for your happiness. I think it would better to practice empathy/love for yourself.
Yes, sorry, you’ve heard the “self-love” thing a million times, it sounds so trite by now, that paragraph contained no new information. Rather than a full argument, I will give you an example.
When I was about to write this comment, I felt a twinge of guilt, like “this comment might take me a while to write, I should get back to work instead.”
Previously, I might have been unable to face this feeling fully. Paraphrasing my subverbal mental motions: “If I really think about whether I want to write this comment or get to work, and come down on the side of writing the comment, I’ll be disgusted by how lazy I am! That’s scary and unpleasant. But I really want to write a comment, and if I let myself really consider it, it might not happen because my System 2 strongly prioritizes productivity. The only way to get what I want here is to pretend I don’t see my guilt and start writing.”
But now, I have a mindset that “regardless of what I do, I just really genuinely love myself. Sometimes I will do things that are bad by my own lights, but I will fundamentally be okay even if this happens.”
This gave me some breathing room and unlocked the option to actually think about this. I love that I want to improve the world by doing work! I love that I want to improve the world by writing this comment! What’s the best solution to make myself as fully satisfied as possible?
I determined that I should try to limit the scope of the comment to this one part of your post, without commenting much on the rest of it. Otherwise, I might have written an even longer comment explaining my take on everything in this whole post instead of just this one piece of it, which would have taken even more time. Not only did I have the mental resources to come up with a decent compromise, I felt way better about it afterwards.
This comment still took way longer than I wanted it to, but instead of beating myself up, I am calmly factoring this into my model of myself, hopefully letting me make better choices in the future. Without the constant background noise of guilt, I feel like I can come up with more strategies, e.g. outlining the exact structure of my future comments before I start so they don’t sprawl as much. But regardless, I feel genuine gratitude for the part of myself that wanted to write this comment, especially since I think it turned out to be a good comment that accords with my values in many ways.
To the rest of your post, I will just say that loving-kindness/metta (closely adjacent to “empathy”) feels amazing and when I am feeling it I feel that I am fundamentally closer to the kind of person I’d like to be. I was not really able to access this emotion, or internalize the mindset described in this comment, until I went on a Jhourney meditation retreat last week. I’ll keep the shilling brief: I would recommend them extremely highly.
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.