I’m midway through your post and I want to say that I’ve also been deep in Mad Investor Chaos. In addition to loving it, I am very inspired by it.
Inspired to look for ways to improve my thinking. Looking for things I’m flinching away from—and narrow in on those things for inspection.
I keep asking myself—what is it that I already know about the world that I’m pretending not to see? What are things that I can expect to believe later that I should just update and believe now?
I imagine your writing style here reminds me of the manic way of the characters figuring Law out in Mad Investor Chaos, and I like it.
I really appreciate you for writing how despite verbally agreeing that modesty is unproductive, you nevertheless never judged high-status people as dumb. That’s totally the kind of noticing/Law I imagine we need more of.
And I also imagine this is the sort of mindset Eliezer is looking for—the mindset where you figure those things out unprompted, without an Eliezer there to correct you. And I also judge that in your case, even though you could say you are being prompted—by your desire for validation—well, that’s good enough.
Anyway, back to reading.
NoLongerUsing
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I realized I had the “I’m not a math person” false narrative a few months ago!
Which I imagine comes from a higher-level belief I learned super early on, that runs parallel to the “I’m in a story in which I’m the hero” delusion. That (almost subconscious) belief is something like “if I’m not instantly amazing at something then I suck and I should give up”.
But it’s not even that well defined. I’m more muddled than that.
It could be a barely-conscious rationalization for something closer to “I don’t like how I feel when I fail, it hurts my identity that I’m bright and special and the hero of the story, so I’ll stop trying, stop looking at it, and when prompted I’ll have a new identity-piece ready: ‘I’m-not-an-X-person’”.
I’ve now tried making a new identity-piece story that’ll help (feedback welcome if there’s a flaw to it that I missed). It goes something like—“I expect that when I learn something new I will suck at it, and that’s OK”.
I realize this could lead to me persisting in things I’m genuinely terrible at when I should instead put my energy on something different. So I have a safeguard mindset that goes “get feedback from people who won’t be scared to hurt you, and evaluate if you should be doing something else to achieve the goal.”