I think we need to examine the extent to which the sense of inadequacy was kinda obviously load-bearing in most of these situations. Humans are extremely socially motivated. If you tell someone “you’re totally fine the way you are”, you should expect that to cause them to stagnate. I think the reason popular psychology is so content with that sort of stagnation is that it never had any goals beyond contentment itself. We can make healthier kinds of people than that, people who pursue their deepest desires beyond contentment and who can bear the weight of stricter moral injunctions than just “live peacefully”.
To some extent, it is definitely wrong to rid yourself of all feelings of inadequacy, because your job is to improve things, including yourself, and if you can improve a thing, then the thing is inadequate for some purpose it could otherwise have had. To be free of all feelings of inadequacy actually is just stagnation.
Yes; except for working on alignment, where it’s pretty easy to care about raising the odds of sentient beings surviving and flourishing in our light-cone. After THAT we can figure out how people can work on projects without a sense of inadequacy as motivation.
Or get over our cultural focus on inadequacy and let people just enjoy lazing about and screwing around. What’s so bad about stagnation if you nobody needs to work to survive?
I don’t think it depends on that at all, in theory you can do any type of optimisation work without calling it inadequacy.
And after alignment is solved, I don’t think our work ends. It is human to strive. When I say “it’s your job to improve things” The ‘you’ is pointed at every human seat of consciousness. That’s what they do. They don’t stop wanting to create except out of heartbreak and shame and fear. I think it’s possible that we will one day have good reasons to stagnate, I’m far from sure of it, because peace has varying shades of excellence, and staying at the height of excellence may require ongoing striving too.
I think we need to examine the extent to which the sense of inadequacy was kinda obviously load-bearing in most of these situations. Humans are extremely socially motivated. If you tell someone “you’re totally fine the way you are”, you should expect that to cause them to stagnate. I think the reason popular psychology is so content with that sort of stagnation is that it never had any goals beyond contentment itself. We can make healthier kinds of people than that, people who pursue their deepest desires beyond contentment and who can bear the weight of stricter moral injunctions than just “live peacefully”.
To some extent, it is definitely wrong to rid yourself of all feelings of inadequacy, because your job is to improve things, including yourself, and if you can improve a thing, then the thing is inadequate for some purpose it could otherwise have had. To be free of all feelings of inadequacy actually is just stagnation.
Yes; except for working on alignment, where it’s pretty easy to care about raising the odds of sentient beings surviving and flourishing in our light-cone. After THAT we can figure out how people can work on projects without a sense of inadequacy as motivation.
Or get over our cultural focus on inadequacy and let people just enjoy lazing about and screwing around. What’s so bad about stagnation if you nobody needs to work to survive?
I don’t think it depends on that at all, in theory you can do any type of optimisation work without calling it inadequacy.
And after alignment is solved, I don’t think our work ends. It is human to strive. When I say “it’s your job to improve things” The ‘you’ is pointed at every human seat of consciousness. That’s what they do. They don’t stop wanting to create except out of heartbreak and shame and fear. I think it’s possible that we will one day have good reasons to stagnate, I’m far from sure of it, because peace has varying shades of excellence, and staying at the height of excellence may require ongoing striving too.