I think for good emotions the feel-it-completely thing happens naturally anyway.
cousin_it(Vladimir Slepnev)
To me it’s less about thoughts and more about emotions. And not about doing it all the time, but only when I’m having some intense emotion and need to do something about it.
For example, let’s say I’m angry about something. I imagine there’s a knob in my mind: make the emotion stronger or weaker. (Or between feeling it less, and feeling it more.) What I usually do is turn the knob up. Try to feel the emotion more completely and in more detail, without trying to push any of it away. What usually happens next is the emotion kinda decides that it’s been heard and goes away: a few minutes later I realize that whatever I was feeling is no longer as intense or urgent. Or I might even forget it entirely and find my mind thinking of something else.
It’s counterintuitive but it’s really how it works for me; been doing it for over a decade now. It’s the closest thing to a mental cheat code that I know.
There’s an amazing HN comment that I mention everytime someone links to this essay. It says don’t do what the essay says, you’ll make yourself depressed. Instead do something a bit different, and maybe even opposite.
Let’s say for example you feel annoyed by the fat checkout lady. DFW advises you to step over your annoyance, imagine the checkout lady is caring for her sick husband, and so on. But that kind of approach to your own feelings will hurt you in the long run, and maybe even seriously hurt you. Instead, the right thing is to simply feel annoyed at the checkout lady. Let the feeling come and be heard. After it’s heard, it’ll be gone by itself soon enough.
Here’s the whole comment, to save people the click:
DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis (“This is water”) is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.
To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It’s the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; “Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops.”
In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.
Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.
The “trick” to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the “master” DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I’m disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples’ lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.
Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can’t be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it’s an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.
There’s something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.
[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]
And another comment from a different person making the same point:
Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace’s.
In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.
Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it’s inside his head, it’s intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.
He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base—CBT and it’s variants.
Wow, it’s worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is “government-complete” and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.
What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?
Or that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can’t?
I think any theory of school that doesn’t mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?
I sometimes had this feeling from Conway’s work, in particular, combinatorial game theory and surreal numbers to me feel closer to mathematical invention than mathematical discovery. This kind of things are also often “leaf nodes” on the tree of knowledge, not leading to many followup discoveries, so you could say their counterfactual impact is low for that reason.
In engineering, the best example I know is vulcanization of rubber. It has had a huge impact on today’s world, but Goodyear developed it by working alone for decades, when nobody else was looking in that direction.
You’re saying governments can’t address existential risk, because they only care about what happens within their borders and term limits. And therefore we should entrust existential risk to firms, which only care about their own profit in the next quarter?!
Yeah, the trapped priors thing is pretty worrying to me too. But I’m confused about the opposing interventions thing. Do charter cities, or labor unions, rely on donations that much? Is it really so common for donations to cancel each other out? I guess advocacy donations (for example, pro-life vs pro-choice) do cancel each other out, so maybe we could all agree that advocacy isn’t charity.
If the housing crisis is caused by low-density rich neighborhoods blocking redevelopment of themselves (as seems the consensus on the internet now), could it be solved by developers buying out an entire neighborhood or even town in one swoop? It’d require a ton of money, but redevelopment would bring even more money, so it could be win-win for everyone. Does it not happen only due to coordination difficulties?
I don’t know about others, but to me these approaches sound like “build a bureaucracy from many well-behaved agents”, and it seems to me that such a bureaucracy wouldn’t necessarily behave well.
I mean, one of the participants wrote: “getting comments that engage with what I write and offer a different, interesting perspective can almost be more rewarding than money”. Others asked us for feedback on their non-winning entries. It feels to me that interaction between more and less experienced folks can be really desirable and useful for both, as long as it’s organized to stay within a certain “lane”.
I have maybe a naive question. What information is needed to find the MSP image within the neural network? Do we have to know the HMM to begin with? Or could it be feasible someday to inspect a neural network, find something that looks like an MSP image, and infer the HMM from it?
For example, if there were certain states of the world which I wanted to avoid at all costs (and thus violate the continuity axiom), I could assign zero utility to it and use geometric averaging. I couldn’t do this with arithmetic averaging and any finite utilities.
Well, you can’t have some states as “avoid at all costs” and others as “achieve at all costs”, because having them in the same lottery leads to nonsense, no matter what averaging you use. And allowing only one of the two seems arbitrary. So it seems cleanest to disallow both.
If I wanted to program a robot which sometimes preferred lotteries to any definite outcome, I wouldn’t be able to program the robot using arithmetic averaging over goodness values.
But geometric averaging wouldn’t let you do that either, or am I missing something?
Sent the form.
What do you think about combining teaching and research? Similar to the Humboldt idea of the university, but it wouldn’t have to be as official or large-scale.
When I was studying math in Moscow long ago, I was attending MSU by day, and in the evenings sometimes went to the “Independent University”, which wasn’t really a university. Just a volunteer-run and donation-funded place with some known mathematicians teaching free classes on advanced topics for anyone willing to attend. I think they liked having students to talk about their work. Then much later, when we ran the AI Alignment Prize here on LW, I also noticed that the prize by itself wasn’t too important; the interactions between newcomers and old-timers were a big part of what drove the thing.
So maybe if you’re starting an organization now, it could be worth thinking about this kind of generational mixing, research/teaching/seminars/whatnot. Though there isn’t much of a set curriculum on AI alignment now, and teaching AI capability is maybe not the best idea :-)
Yeah, that might be a good idea in case any rich employers stumble on this :-)
In terms of goals, I like making something, having many people use it, and getting paid for it. I’m not as motivated by meaning, probably different from most EAs in that sense.
In terms of skillset, I’d say I’m a frontend-focused generalist. The most fun programming experience in my life was when I built an online map just by myself—the rendering of map data to png tiles, the serving backend, the javascript for dragging and zooming, there weren’t many libraries back then—and then it got released and got hundreds of thousands of users. The second most fun was when I made the game—coming up with the idea, iterating on the mechanics, graphic design, audio programming, writing text, packaging for web and mobile, the whole thing—and it got quite popular too. So that’s the prototypical good job for me.
I don’t really understand your approach yet. Let’s call your decision theory CLDT. You say counterfactuals in CLDT should correspond to consistent universes. For example, the counterfactual “what if a CLDT agent two-boxed in Newcomb’s problem” should correspond to a consistent universe where a CLDT agent two-boxes on Newcomb’s problem. Can you describe that universe in more detail?
Done! I didn’t do it at first because I thought it’d have to be in person only, but then clicked around in the form and found that remote is also possible.
Besides math and programming, what are your other skills and interests?
Playing and composing music is the main one.
I have an idea of a puzzle game, not sure if it would be good or bad, I haven’t done even a prototype. So if anyone is interested, feel free to try
Yeah, you’re missing out on all the fun in game-making :-) You must build the prototype yourself, play with it yourself, tweak the mechanics, and at some moment the stars will align and something will just work and you’ll know it. There’s no way anyone else can do it but you.
Yeah. My point was, we can’t even be sure which behavior-preserving optimizations (of the kind done by optimizing compilers, say) will preserve consciousness. It’s worrying because these optimizations can happen innocuously, e.g. when your upload gets migrated to a newer CPU with fancier heuristics. And yeah, when self-modification comes into the picture, it gets even worse.
Orwell is one of my personal heroes, 1984 was a transformative book to me, and I strongly recommend Homage to Catalonia as well.
That said, I’m not sure making theories of art is worth it. Even when great artists do it (Tolkien had a theory of art, and Oscar Wilde, and Flannery O’Connor, and almost every artist if you look close enough), it always seems to be the kind of theory which suits that artist and nobody else. Would advice like “good prose is like a windowpane” or “efface your own personality” improve the writing of, say, Hunter S. Thompson? Heck no, his writing is the opposite of that and charming for it! Maybe the only possible advice to an artist is to follow their talent, and advising anything more specific is as likely to hinder as help.