moses
Clarifying questions:
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By agency, do you mean anyone who has the inclination to “think through plans”/”decide how to pursue goals”, or only those who do these things correctly and consequently actually achieve something tangible? I’m asking because there’s a world of difference between “how do people gain the inclination to behave ‘agenty’” and “how do people actually achieve things”.
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If someone has ambitious goals, but they don’t yet have “plans which they realistically expect to achieve”, because the planning part is really really hard (but they definitely view themselves as “this [big goal] is what I want from life” and they’re emotionally committed to it), does that fall under what you mean by ambition? Or is the “plans” part necessary? Again, big difference between having grand visions for yourself and having a concrete set of steps to achieve them.
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Do you mean to imply that there is a relationship/correlation between agency and ambition? I.e., someone who has larger plans/goals is more likely to be self-motivating/decisive/etc. and vice versa?
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Also, I for one would love to read insight porn about your pet psych theory, aside from getting a literature review. I wouldn’t worry too much about getting stuck in “cognitive traps”; insight porn is merely for entertainment and literature reviews are for getting the facts :)
So interesting—I have the exact opposite intuition: it is technically relatively easy to have a large impact, if you are the kind of person naturally inclined to do so (i.e., very roughly speaking, high in the achievement/industriousness aspect of conscientiousness, probably?), but almost nobody is naturally inclined to do so (I blame the ancestral environment).
If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life.
…How, in Lord’s name, is this not precisely the case? Every major entrepreneur, artist, musician, public intellectual, celebrity, politician, athlete, scientist, engineer, activist, etc., etc., there’s millions of people who affect millions or more lives constantly.
Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail
I think this is roughly correct, though. Or, to put it better: To the degree that you are low in conscientiousness, this is true for you. To the degree that you are high in conscientiousness, you’re not reading this comment, because you have better things to do with your life.
That basic instruction is useful in getting started
I disagree, I think it’s useless even for the very first session. The one who receives such instruction will
immediately shoot themselves in the foot by beating themselves up for forgetting the breath and pretty much plateau from there onward
not understand the relationship between awareness and attention, rendering the practice useless for building mindfulness (and they will probably fall asleep)
not understand the process and not be guided to develop joy in the practice, therefore not be motivated to practice consistently and dilligently, therefore probably drop the whole thing soon
and so on, and so on.
Is Buddhism just hip right now?
I think it’s just that rationalists are not skeptics; we don’t automatically dismiss things because they sound “woo”. If Lord Jesus came up with a helpful mental technique, I’m all ears.
it may help the individual who makes that choice [to shut up and go practice more]
I’ll just reiterate that I think this is wrong. Correct instruction (and sufficient amount of it!) not only makes the practice much more productive, it results in much higher chance of the person actually sticking to the practice, because they are more motivated, because they understand what they’re doing and exactly how it will lead to progress.
This is true not only of meditation, but from my experience e.g. of weightlifting. Anecdote time: When I started weightlifting, I spent about three minutes on research, picked up the first beginner routine that seemed to make sense, and followed it for ~two years with minor adjustments here and there. Only then I seeked detailed understanding of what I’m doing, the anatomy and the science behind resistance training etc. After that, my practice became much more productive, much more enjoyable, and therefore much more consistent. I now understand what the fuck I’m doing.
Because the instruction I followed in the beginning was a bit more detailed than what J- gives for meditation, I was able to make some progress—I imagine that if I received instruction from someone who viewed weightlifting like J- views meditation, I wouldn’t get anywhere and I would get myself seriously injured—but if I had in the beginning the level of instruction I have now, I would look like fucking Schwarzenegger by now. I wasted a lot of time in the gym by not operating with correct instruction.
And exactly the same goes for my personal experience with meditation: I started off my practice with one of those 10-day Goenka retreats, so I had some instruction, so I made some progress, but only after I started reading The Mind Illuminated did I start practicing consistently, diligently, with joy, and making steady progress.
I mean, sure, the Mind and its incessant thinking gets in the way of living and doing and Being, but the answer is not to go do things with improper instruction. That’s not even overcorrecting; that’s just trying to solve the problem at the wrong level and in a wrong way.
Ah, I see. I read J-’s instruction paragraph as “here’s all the instruction you need to start meditating, now go meditate”, which stirred up agitation in me because I see many people waste their time acting on too little instruction.[1]
Possibly, in the context of the OP, it is better read as general frustration: “Ugh, you guys keep overthinking everything, just go do X instead of talking about X all the time, for all X.”
Maybe J- sees many people wasting their time intellectualizing and overthinking; the two of us draw from different experiences, so we have different triggers and even perceive the entire situation through a different lens.
So let’s go back to this:
But, for fuck’s sakes, philosophizing serves the role of masturbation. This is an endemic problem for LW adjacent people, because you all enable each other! There’s a culture of it here.
I agree that rationality (just like all intellectual communities) select heavily for the type of a person who overthinks everything, but I don’t really see the content on LW enabling this. Or—hmm—maybe it depends on how you see LW. I see LW as a place where I come to read Insight Porn and have intellectual discussion, because it is pleasant and entertaining. If someone sees LW as a place which serves up self-help advice, then, necessarily, just as roughly all self-help advice in existence, this would be viewed as enabling intellectualization-as-psychological-defence-against-change.
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Apart from meditation and weightlifting, learning to code comes to mind. I see people-who-self-study struggle needlessly for months, because an online course explains how to write functions and how to write ifs and whiles and whatnot, but doesn’t explain what happens under the hood. Way too little instruction.
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Thanks! I found particularly useful the reconciliation between “integrating the shadow” and “not identifying with your feelings”.
Except if you’re on Firefox, in which case there is no widget. (As an aside, since switching to Firefox, I’m astonished how much of the internet just doesn’t work in it. Do frontend developers… not check whether their website works in Firefox? Is Firefox so niche these days? It’s not like you have to run it in VM like you’d have to with Edge/Safari… Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here; my main point was that the widget doesn’t appear in Firefox, just fyi.)
Thanks for the detailed response! I wasn’t aware that Firefox was such a clusterfuck. I think I also had pretty old browser market share numbers cached in my head and those numbers were probably for desktop market only; the 5 % number surprised me. Huh, Firefox actually is niche; I was being facetious.
I see. I should say FF 66 on Ubuntu. But anyway, Said’s comment helped me resolve much of my confusion.
Hm, I see the widget in Chrome though
I skimmed the paper but I still can’t understand how von Foerster comes up with the notion that more people = faster technological growth. (Kurzgesagt use the same assumption in their video on “egostic altruism”, but they don’t explain where they got it from either.) Does someone know how that works?
Yes, my confusion was indeed about the underlying model of innovation. Intuitively is seems to me that progress on a particular research problem would be a function of how smart {the smartest person working on the problem} is, but then I guess if you have more smart people, you can attack more research problems at once, so I guess the model does make sense 🤔
I think my views are somewhat similar. Let me crosspost a comment I made in a private conversation a while ago:
I think the main reason why people are asking “Why aren’t Rationalists winning?” is because Rationality was simply being oversold.
Yeah, seems like it. I was thinking: why would you expect rationality to make you exceptionally high status and high income?[1] And I think rationality was sold as general-purpose optimal decision-making, so once you have that, you can reach any goals which are theoretically reachable from your starting point by some hypothetical optimal decision-maker—and if not, that’s only because the Art is not fully mature yet.
Now, in reality, rationality was something like:
a collection of mental movements centered around answering difficult/philosophical questions—with the soft implication that you should ingrain them, but not a clear guide on how (aside from CFAR workshops);
a mindset of transhumanism and literally-saving-the-world, doing-the-impossible ambition, delivered via powerfully motivational writing;
a community of (1) nerds who (2) pathologically overthink absolutely everything.
I definitely would expect rationalists to do better at some things than the reference class of {nerds who pathologically overthink everything}:
I would expect them not to get tripped up if explicitly prompted to consider confusing philosophical topics like meaning or free will, because the mental movement of {difficult philosophical question → activate Rationality™} is pretty easy and straightforward.
Same thing if they encounter e.g. a different political opinions or worldviews: I’d expect them to be much better at reconsidering their dogmas, if, again, externally prompted. I’d even expect them to do better evaluating strategies.
But I don’t think there’s a good reason to expect rationalists to do better unprompted—to have more unprompted imagination, creativity, to generate strategies—or to notice things better: their blind spots, additional dimensions in the solution space.
Rationality also won’t help you with inherent traits like conscientiousness, recklessness, tendency for leadership, the biological component of charisma (beyond what reading self-help literature might do for you).
I also wouldn’t expect rationalists to be able to dig their way through arbitrarily many layers of Resistance on their own. They might notice that they want to do a thing T and are not doing it, but then instead of doing it, they might start brainstorming ways how to make themselves do T. And then they might notice that they’re overthinking things, but instead of doing T, they start thinking about how to stop overthinking and instead start doing. And then they might notice that and pat themselves on the back and everything and think, “hey, that would make a great post on LW”, and so they write a post on LW about overthinking things instead of fucking doing the fucking thing already.
Rationality is great for critical thinking, for evaluating whatever inputs you get; so that helps you to productively consider good external ideas, not get tripped by bad ideas, and not waste your time being confused. In the ideal case. (It might even make you receptive to personal feedback in the extreme case. Depending on your personality traits, I guess.)
On the other hand, rationality doesn’t help you with exactly those things that might lead to status and wealth: generating new ideas, changing your biological proclivities, noticing massive gaps in your epistemology, or overturning that heavily selected-for tendency to overthink and just stumbling ass-first out into the world and doing things.
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“High status and high income” is a definition of “winning” that you get if you read all the LW posts about “why aren’t Rationalists winning?”, look at what the author defines as “winning”, then do an intersection of those.
In other words: Rationality (if used well) protects you against shooting your foot off, and almost everyone does shoot their foot off, so if you ask me, all the Rationalists who walk around with both their feet are winning hard at life, but having both feet doesn’t automatically make you Jeff Bezos.
After you’re done with the class, do you think you could post a summary of what you ended up going with?