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Checkout my Biography.
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Johannes C. Mayer
My Advice for Incoming SERI MATS Scholars
Saying no to the Appleman
I can see how I am Dumb
A Good Explanation of Differential Gears
Focus on the Hardest Part First
Pivotal Acts might Not be what You Think they are
What Helped Me—Kale, Blood, CPAP, X-tiamine, Methylphenidate
Leave an Emotional Line of Retreat
Being at peace with Doom
Bite Sized Tasks
Eliezer’s Videos
[Video] Too much Empiricism kills you
Computer Input Sucks—A Brain Dump
I have been taking bupropion for two weeks now. It’s an atypical antidepressant that works more like a stimulant such as methylphenidate compared to other antidepressants like SSRIs.
So far my experience has been very positive. Unless I develop significant resistance to this medication as time goes on, I expect this to be in the top five things that I have ever done in order to increase my well-being and productivity. It does not have any annoying side effects for me. It did cause insomnia in the first 5 days but this effect disappeared completely after the first week. It was also very easy and fast to get a prescription (in Germany). It’s not available in the UK or Australia iirc.
Therefore I tentatively recommend if you are even slightly depressed sometimes, that you read this document.
For me it was especially useful because it helped in 3 ways:
Make me less depressed (works very well for this. That is what it is for what it is prescribed for after all)
It makes me less fatigued (I had some chronic fatigue before. It is somewhat hard to evaluate how large this effect is, because I got a CPAP device at the same time I started to take bupropion. But there seems to be a noticeable difference before and after I take the bupropion.)
It slightly lessens ADHD symptoms (this is mainly useful for me right now because it takes forever to get a prescription for ADHD medication unless I would put in a lot more time into optimizing to get one faster)
It might even make sense to think about this if you are experiencing any subset of these problems.
Arrogance VS Accurate Description
I know what it feels like to be arrogant. I was arrogant in the past. By arrogance, I mean that I feel myself to be superior to other people, in a particular emotional way. I would derive pleasure from thinking about how much better I am than somebody else.
I would talk with friends about other people in a subtly derogative way. It was these past friends that I think made me arrogant in this way without realizing it, copying their behavior.
All of this seems very bad to me. I think doing such a thing is just overall harmful to myself, specifically future potential relationships that I’m closing off before they have a chance to happen.
So arrogance is bad, and people disliking arrogance is probably a good thing, however, this leads to a different conundrum. Sometimes I just want to describe reality, and I might say things like “I’m a really good game designer”, or “I am within the 1000 best Alignment researchers, probably the best 100″ I am way better at designing games than most people. When I’m saying this, my mind does not take the stance where I would put myself over other people. And it doesn’t make me feel really good when I say it.
Now, maybe sometimes there are still hints of arrogance in my mind when making statements like that. But I genuinely think it’s mostly not there. But people still interpret this in exactly the same way. They perceive this as arrogance, even though the actual internal mechanisms in my brain that make me say these things, I think, are entirely different. One is some adaptation in order to exploit social dynamics to increase your own standing, while the other is simply stating my current best guess of what reality is actually like.
Once a person told me that they think Eliezer is really arrogant. Maybe he is running into the same problem.
Here is a model of mine, that seems related.
[Edit: Add Epistemic status]
Epistemic status: I have used this successfully in the past and found it helpful. It is relatively easy to do.utilitytime_investment is large for me.
I think it is helpful to be able to emotionally detach yourself from your ideas. There is an implicit “concept of I” in our minds. When somebody criticizes this “concept of I”, it is painful. If somebody says “You suck”, that hurts.
There is an implicit assumption in the mind that this concept of “I” is eternal. This has the effect, that when somebody says “You suck”, it is actually more like they say “You sucked in the past, you suck now, and you will suck, always and ever”.
In order to emotionally detach yourself from your ideas, you need to sever the links in your mind, between your ideas and this “concept of I”. You need to see an idea as an object that is not related to you. Don’t see it as “your idea”, but just as an idea.
It might help to imagine that there is an idea-generation machine in your brain. That machine makes ideas magically appear in your perception as thoughts. Normally when somebody says “Your idea is dumb”, you feel hurt. But now we can translate “Your idea is dumb” to “There is idea-generating machinery in my brain. This machinery has produced some output. Somebody says this output is dumb”.
Instead of feeling hurt, you can think “Hmm, the idea-generating machinery in my brain produced an idea that this person thinks is bad. Well maybe they don’t understand my idea yet, and they criticize their idea of my idea, and not actually my idea. How can I make them understand?” This thought is a lot harder to have while being busy feeling hurt.
Or “Hmm, this person that I think is very competent thinks this idea is bad, and after thinking about it I agree that this idea is bad. Now how can I change the idea-generating machinery in my brain, such that in the future I will have better ideas?” That thought is a lot harder to have when you think that you yourself are the problem. What is that even supposed to mean that you yourself are the problem? This might not be a meaningful statement, but it is the default interpretation when somebody criticizes you.
The basic idea here is, to frame everything without any reference to yourself. It is not me producing a bad plan, but some mechanism that I just happened to observe the output of. In my experience, this not only helps alleviate pain but also makes you think thoughts that are more useful.