Strong upvoted, these guides on what to expect for situation X are very useful, especially when detailed nuts-and-bolts like this. There’s a lot of good stuff here that anyone who has a pneumothorax can use to at least set a baseline of what to expect. I find that too many people stop at “eh, well, everyone kind of knows this” and thus few ever write about it.
Glad you’re okay and that you have such an awesome wife!
“Imagine there’s a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Sounds impausible? No, really, you can just save the kid. Don’t trust it? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there’s also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you’d have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?”
My gut reaction to reading this might illuminate why people don’t take stories about utopia or easily-accomplished things seriously: there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to be gained by telling a story where everything goes well, there’s no dilemma or moral problem, and nothing salient to latch on to.
Imagine there was a TV show about a starship. It is run well, the ship functions normally, the crew go about their days, there’s plenty of power and supplies, the journey is vast and not very notable, their mission of moving cargo between two planets back and forth goes fine with no complaints. Once you got past the 2- or 3-episode explanation and tour of the ship and her crew, there wouldn’t really be much else different on episode 105 as there was on episode 5.
What would it take to make this show better? Conflict of some sort, perhaps between the crew, or with the environment, or the government, or maybe the suppliers/buyers of the cargo, or maybe with the isolating environment of space and the ennui of staring out a mostly-black window 24⁄7.
I also posit that we see this pattern in our own lives; we need something to do with our time, even if that something is just a hobby project or reading a few books. Consider fresh retirees in good shape: home paid off, kids in their own careers and doing well, spouse happy. Many such retirees may choose to take it easy, resting and watching TV, and this often either makes them miserable enough to reconsider or saddles them with health problems from their sedentary lifestyle, sometimes leading to death. Contrast with retirees who still make and keep plans, still go traveling, work on projects.
So that’s my guess. People don’t take stories about happy worlds where nothing goes wrong very seriously because there just isn’t much to say about such worlds, so why write stories about them?
Okay, this is definitely true, too. I also do enjoy a more consistent ability to justify my actions and beliefs, which is far from nothing and not worth writing off. I guess, for me, the missing ingredient is that the other person gets it once I make a logical and reasonable justification; if that happens, I think it’s fine to be friends with a very critical person.
I’m not a regular user of LW, but I wanted to weigh in anyway. The style of endless asymmetric-effort criticism can be very wearing on people with perfectionist or OCD-like tendencies. I am, sadly, one of those people. In my head is a multi-faced voice of rage and criticism that constantly second guesses my decisions and thoughts and says many of the same things about anyone else’s work or life or decisions. This kind of thing is one of the faces, able to find fault in anything and treat it all with importance both high and invariant over any sort of context. I think the voice is something like an IFS firefighter. In fact, here he is now:
wow. You come to LessWrong (stop abbreviating) and you can’t even be bothered to put five seconds into reading Kaj’s Unlocking the Emotional Brain summary to see if it really is a firefighter and not a protector?
It’s exhausting and demoralizing. This is far from the only component, to be fair, and I actually don’t doubt that Said is honestly trying to make the world a better place… but this particular flavor of criticism is not making things better. It can be done well, but this isn’t it. This makes people, over time and without really noticing it at first, get a submodule installed in their heads that constantly criticizes, second guesses, attempts to justify, apologizes for, pre-emptively clarifies, and talks itself out of things in every domain of life.
...though I guess that may be a natural attractor state for minds like this. Still, while the circumstances for the ban are unfortunate, I think it was correct. For anyone who wants to do anything, having enough energy to do it is key, and things like this just drain it. It’s like fighting a wall of molasses.
Small note that is probably pretty simple by the standards of this excellent comment section, but strong emotion is, itself a problem that needs to be solved, often first. It’s like snowfall on the driveway. Some people get a little with the vagaries of life, others get a lot. Sometimes it melts quickly, sometimes you have to shovel it.
To be less metaphorical, people need to feel believed, cared for, and like they’d be listened to. Nail-in-head woman might be a bit silly to not take the nail out of her head, and I used to believe something closer to that in the general case. These days, though, when someone is having trouble with something and their head is clouded to obvious solutions, I might like to:
Hug them if they’re willing
Listen for awhile, and hold in mind that my initial advice might be wrong, insufficient, and that they’ve probably already tried some of my ideas early on
Ask questions and iterate to try to find what the underlying problems is (LessWrong and Rationality helped me a ton in trying to debug my own mind and find better ways to formulate the problems I face)
Feeling seen, feeling heard, believed—it seems pretty important for a lot of people in ways that I may not fully understand yet. I know politics is the mindkiller, so I won’t dive too deep, but I will say that it seems a lot of online political discussion doesn’t get past the “this issue is real and mostly like we say it is, your lack of belief hurts” stage.
That first, and then we can talk solutions.
Oh, definitely, I truly think this is most of the explanation, but was curious how much the other direction contributed.
Small hypothesis that I’m not very confident of at all but is worth mentioning because I’ve seen it surfaced by others:
“We live in the safest era in human history, yet we’re more terrified of death than ever before.”
What if these things are related? Everyone talks about kids being kept in smaller and smaller ranges despite child safety never higher, but what if keeping kids in a smaller range is what causes their greater safety?
Like I said, I don’t fully believe this. One counterargument is that survivorship bias shouldn’t apply here—even if people in the past died much more often from preventable safety-related things like accidents or kidnappings, their friends and family would remain to report their demise to the world. In other words, if free-roaming was really as risky as we think it is, there should be tons of stories of it from the past, and I don’t tend to see as many.
(although maybe comment threads I read on the matter select for happy stories on free-roaming as a kid in the 80s and select against sad ones, I dunno)
Yeah, but then you really lose the capacity to deanonymize effectively. On priors, I can guess you’re likely to be American or Western European, probably like staying up late if you’re the former/live in Western timezones. I can read a lot more of your comments and probably deduce a lot, but just going off your two comments alone doesn’t make it any more likely to find where you live, for instance.
Even quantum cryptography couldn’t restore cleartext that had half of it redacted and replaced with “----” or something.
Strong upvote from me, this is a huge cause issue in my life and I’m sure in many others. Any mental stuff aside, it seems the brain has strong control systems around not wanting to do too much of stuff it doesn’t like, and more of stuff it can’t get enough of.
One thing I’ve always wondered about is how a person’s affinities and frustrations are made. Why do some people love to write, so much so that time for writing just appears without conscious effort, whereas others find it a grinding chore they can’t wait to be done with? What makes some people feel a calling to be, say, a veterinarian or a plumber? Why do most people dislike exercise but a few really love it and couldn’t make themselves stop if they tried?
If we can figure this out, maybe we can figure out how to move stuff between categories. Rather than trying to learn how to live with the suck, maybe we can find ways to make stuff not suck, as much as we can, at least.
Sorry, yes, this is what I was also getting at, that the joke has basis in reality. My comment was not worded very well.
I mean, it’s a joke for a reason. SpongeBob had its “daring escape through the perfume department” gag, too.
But somehow it feels wrong to just talk to yourself out loud.
Haha, yeah, totally. Uh… I never talk to myself for extended periods while pacing up and down my apartment… or workplace. Nope, never.
(it helps me think better if I do it out loud. Sorry to anyone who I give off insane vibes to!)
The concept of one-shotting psychological and mental issues is quite intriguing, I must admit. I really do think there’s a sizable blindspot around actual solutions for tons of mental issues, and not because I think people are faking or lying about wanting to change. I do it myself, even; when I think about trying to make my life better, I often get caught up in the absurdities of my mind and what it does, and that System-1-FEELS like the correct place to start.
For some stuff, I do think there can be one-neat-trick style fixes, too, but that they’re often quite out of left field and hard to synthesize on one’s own, which does rather suck. The “and?” example you have above fits that quite well, it’s not something someone would ordinarily say (well, out loud, the fear of coming off as rude will stop a lot of people).
Speaking of, maybe one of the biggest obstacles here is making the other person feel heard and understood and not dismissed? You seem to do quite well per your accounts, but man alive I’d say probably >99.5% of Internet discussions I read that involve a) two sides and b) any level of distrust devolve into pointless arguing about what was said, meant, heard, and felt. A real shame, and I think this can come up a lot in therapeutic environments, too, where the therapist knows what they want to say but must not say it because the patient needs to realize it for themselves via gentle questioning and guiding. Communication is really hard and no one’s intended message ever makes it 100% over (see https://thezvi.substack.com/p/just-saying-what-you-mean-is-impossible).
Why, the Practical tag (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/practical) has a lot of cool stuff like this.
My opinion is that whatever value of epsilon you pick should be low enough such that it never happens once in your life. “I flipped a coin but it doesn’t actually exist” should never happen. Maybe it would happen if you lived for millions of years, but in a normal human lifespan, never once.
She then proceeded to sock puppet it in mock dialogue to the student next to her.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
...
Uh, to contribute something useful: good piece! I love the idea of aiming for any goal in a broader direction, landing even close to an idealized “perfect goal” is probably still OOMs better than trying for the perfect goal, failing, and going “eh, well, guess I’ll lay bricks for 40 years”.
I also like the section on intrinsic motivation—describing it as “all the things you find yourself doing if left to your own devices”. I do fear that, for many, this category contains things that can’t be used to support you, though, but then your diagram showing the dots outside the bounds of “video games” but pointing back to it I think nicely resolves that conundrum.
And when all else fails, apply random search.
Hell yes. Speaking from my own experience here, whatever you do, don’t get stuck. Random search if you have to, but if you’re unhappy, keep moving.
Ah, I think I see where you’re pointing at. You’re afraid we might be falling prey to the streetlamp effect, thinking that some quality specifically about Western diets is causing obesity, and restricting our thoughts if we accept that as true. I agree, and it’s pretty terrifying how little we know and how much conflicting data there is out there about the causes of obesity.
It might very well be that the true cause is outside of the Western diet and has little to do with it, and I could definitely see that being true given how much we’ve spent and how little we’ve gotten for research taking the Western diet connection for granted.
Sure, I broadly agree, and I do prefer that people are living longer, even obese, than they would be with severe and long-term malnutrition. I think what you’re saying here is “the modern Western diet provides a benefit in that it turns what would have been fatalities by malnutrition into survival with obesity”, but please correct me if I’m wrong.
Basically, it is good—very good, one of the greatest human accomplishments—that we have been able to roll back so much suffering from starvation and malnutrition. I think, though, that we can address obesity while also avoiding a return to the days of malnutrition.
Or, in other words, there are three tiers, each better than the last:
Planes get shot down and pilots die
Planes get riddled with bullets but return safely
Planes don’t get damaged and pilots can complete mission
It’s worth it to learn to sell your own ideas, not in a bullshitting or kissing-up sort of way, but just in learning to present what you believe in your ideas honestly. Then you can be the presenter and the inventor.