Ruby

• Ruby 13 Mar 2019 20:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MrMind's comment on: Plans are Re­cur­sive & Why This is Important

  Wow, that’s re­ally cool to learn! I only have a be­gin­ner level knowl­edge of func­tional pro­gram­ming con­cepts and was not aware of hy­lo­mor­phisms and un­folds (just ba­sics like fold left, fold right). Thanks for bring­ing that to my at­ten­tion, I might try to read that whole se­ries.

• Ruby 11 Mar 2019 23:40 UTC

  4 points

  on: Why should I care about ra­tio­nal­ity?

  Not so long ago I hit upon a defi­ni­tion of ra­tio­nal­ity which bet­ter cap­tured what ev­ery­thing peo­ple ac­tu­ally use the term to re­fer to.

  I think a solid defi­ni­tion of ra­tio­nal­ity is: try­ing to do bet­ter on pur­pose.

  In­stead of fol­low­ing your de­fault pro­ce­dure, you pull back and do some­thing differ­ent to get a bet­ter re­sult. This might be think­ing in ways other than the de­fault or do­ing things in ways other than the de­fault.

  A nat­u­ral con­se­quence of ty­ing to do bet­ter on pur­pose is that you look for higher-level im­prove­ments rather than purely im­me­di­ate, do­main-spe­cific con­crete ones. Many peo­ple think to prac­tice and train skills, but the ra­tio­nal­ist seeks to re­flect on how they train and pro­cess. Many peo­ple work to­wards goals, the ra­tio­nal­ist pauses to re­flect on their se­lec­tion goals.

  So why care about ra­tio­nal­ity? Be­cause you want to do bet­ter.

  If you be­lieve that it is pos­si­ble to do bet­ter, and that do­ing bet­ter re­sults in more of what you want—then surely you would want that.

• Ruby 10 Mar 2019 19:26 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid's comment on: Plans are Re­cur­sive & Why This is Important

  It was in the con­text of God’s ac­tions, but I’ve always liked the phrase they taught me in school:

  סוף סוף במחשבה תחילה

  The end, the end, [that which was] first in thought.

  Trans­lates im­pre­cisely, but flows so nicely in He­brew.

Plans are Re­cur­sive & Why This is Important

• Ruby 8 Mar 2019 17:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  No wor­ries! Maybe we can get to the bot­tom of it an­other time, maybe an­other place. :)

• Ruby 8 Mar 2019 3:43 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  Thanks for the elab­o­ra­tion. Yes, I see what you mean by brute force, and I also see how my post might be read to be ad­vis­ing an ap­proach similar to what you de­scribed. I don’t know whether a prag­matic ap­proach like that is a good de­vel­op­men­tal stage to go through? Maybe for a bit, but I’m not sure.

  If the post didn’t shed any light on how a brute force ap­proach is not the only op­tion and not nec­es­sar­ily the best, I think it’s be­cause I for­got that some­one might ap­proach mo­ti­va­tion in that way. Only read­ing your de­scrip­tion brought it back into my mind.

  Go back five to six years I did have a phase when I was very big on “dis­ci­pline”, I cer­tainly tried to muster willpower to make my­self do things—but it was never that suc­cess­ful or sys­tem­atized. Around the time I did be­gin mak­ing more se­ri­ous efforts to be pro­duc­tive I was already en­gaged with CFAR, read­ing mind­in­gour­way.com, and gen­er­ally be­ing coached into an ap­proach of non-willpower-re­li­ance and non-self-co­er­cion. Yet it must have been long enough ago that I think I’d for­got­ten that there’s a very a nat­u­ral ap­proach to mo­ti­va­tion where you pile on pro­duc­tivity tricks in a not quite sus­tain­able/​​healthy way.

  So, thanks for point­ing that all out. That’s a good re­minder.

  For the pub­lic record, I think ideal mo­ti­va­tion is at­tained when you have some­thing re­sem­bling a state of har­mony in your mind and with your­self. You might take ac­tions to make ac­tions seem more at­trac­tive and/​or do things to de­crease temp­ta­tion, but it isn’t co­er­cive or de­plet­ing. This is difficult to achieve and re­quires a lot in­tro­spec­tion, self-aware­ness, re­solv­ing in­ner con­flicts, etc., etc. If you’re do­ing it right, you’re not suffer­ing. You don’t crash. It doesn’t feel like you’re co­erc­ing your­self.

  It’s pos­si­ble I should have stated some­thing like that in the post it­self.

• Ruby 5 Mar 2019 18:38 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  Hmm, I’d like to step back and tally the differ­ent claims that have been sur­faced so we can at least be clear where we dis­agree, even if we don’t end up agree­ing. Among the claims:

  A: Ab­strac­tions are some­times use­ful.

  B: Ab­strac­tions even­tu­ally break down and the un­der­ly­ing com­plex­ity needs to be un­der­stood for fur­ther use­ful­ness.

  C: The ab­strac­tion in my post is only com­pel­ling from a cer­tain stage of de­vel­op­ment /​ it’s limited (but this as­ser­tion was ac­com­panied by the state­ment that this doesn’t mean it was wrong or use­ful).

  D: The ab­strac­tion in my post is un­likely to help many peo­ple.

  E: The par­tic­u­lar ab­strac­tion in my post is leaky, is limited, and can be­come harm­ful af­ter a cer­tain point in de­vel­op­ment.

  F: That ab­strac­tions are in­dis­pens­able and are needed to guide un­der­stand­ing even when you dip to lower lay­ers.

  G: That it’s harm­ful to always be try­ing to look at lower lev­els of ab­strac­tion with­out higher lev­els.

  H. That not un­der­stand­ing lower lev­els means that you don’t un­der­stand very much at all.

  That’s not ev­ery as­ser­tion, but it’s maybe enough to start get­ting some clar­ity. I think that Gor­don, mr-hire, and my­self all agree on A and B broadly, though we might dis­agree on where the line is drawn for each. Gor­don, you write:

  This sounds like the crux of the dis­agree­ment: I think no ab­strac­tion is suffi­ciently non-leaky that you don’t (even­tu­ally) need to un­der­stand more of the un­der­ly­ing com­plex­ity within the con­text I see this post sit­ting in, which is the con­text of what we might call cog­ni­tive, per­sonal, psy­cholog­i­cal, or per­sonal de­vel­op­ment (or to put it in non-stan­dard term, the skill of be­ing hu­man). Un­less your pur­pose is only to un­lock a lit­tle of what you can po­ten­tially do as a hu­man and not all of it, ev­ery ab­strac­tion is even­tu­ally a hin­drance to progress, even if it is a skil­lful hin­der­ance dur­ing cer­tain phases along the path that helps you progress un­til it doesn’t.

  I mean, I wouldn’t dis­agree with that in gen­eral. Though I think a lot of work is be­ing done by the word “even­tu­ally” and “suffi­ciently non-leaky”. I think there are con­texts where you get away with­out need­ing to go all the way deep. Most (I would think over­whelming ma­jor­ity) of peo­ple who code don’t know as­sem­bly and cer­tainly don’t un­der­stand how logic gates are im­ple­mented—and this is pretty fine 99.99% of the time.

  It is fair to say that the ab­strac­tion/​model in my post is not nearly as good as the ab­strac­tion of high-level com­puter lan­guages. That’s true. I mean, ac­tu­ally it breaks pretty quickly. Part 2 of this post will dive deeper. Nonethe­less, I do think it’s quite use­ful even if one don’t read fur­ther. Gor­don, I’m un­clear what your stance is—you first state that it’s use­ful and then state that it’s un­likely to help many peo­ple, so I’m not sure of your ac­tual thought.

  I do dis­agree with C (com­pel­ling only from a cer­tain stage of de­vel­op­ment) in that I think even once you have much deeper un­der­stand­ing, the higher lev­els of ab­strac­tion re­main cru­cially im­por­tant. Just be­cause you un­der­stand elec­tro­mag­netism re­ally well and know the limits of con­ven­tional cir­cuit the­ory (e.g. de­sign­ing su­per duper tiny tran­sis­tors), doesn’t mean you want to throw out cir­cuit the­ory and just solve Maxwell’s equa­tions ev­ery­where—even if even­tu­ally some­times you have to.

  I don’t dis­agree that you need more de­tail for a lot of ap­pli­ca­tions. As men­tioned, this un­for­tu­nately couldn’t make it into the first sin­gle post. As I wrote:

  Say­ing that mo­ti­va­tion is a mat­ter of win­ning in the mo­ment is all very good, but how does one ac­tu­ally do that?

  Un­for­tu­nately, a proper treat­ment of this not-so-small topic will make this past far too long and in­stead re­quires its own post (Mo­ti­va­tion Part 2: How to Win, com­ing soon to a screen near you!). Nonethe­less, I can offer a high-level sum­mary here:

  But again, I don’t think what was pre­sented here stops be­ing com­pel­ling later on.

  I also think D (un­likely to help many peo­ple) is some­what false, de­pend­ing on what counts as “many peo­ple”. Another com­menter felt this post was quite use­ful, some­one else on FB found it rather rev­e­la­tion­ary, and I’d in­fer from those who I know of that sev­eral more benefited even if I don’t know of it di­rectly. That’s be­yond the in­side view that ab­strac­tion/​model pre­sented can be ap­plied already. mr-hire also states sim­pler ideas worked well for a re­ally long time (though I’m not sure which sim­pler ideas or what counts as “brute force”.

  Back to B (ab­strac­tions break down, even­tu­ally be­come a hin­drance). Definitely agree here.

  I think if your ini­tial com­ment, Gor­don, had been some­thing like:

  I think this model/​ab­strac­tion is cor­rect and use­ful to an ex­tent, but I want to flag that it is just a very high-level ab­strac­tion which is miss­ing a lot of the very messy de­tail that is rele­vant (and quite nec­es­sary) de­tail for this do­main. It’ll help you on it’s own at a cer­tain stage, but af­ter that you’ll need more.

  Then I wouldn’t have dis­agreed at all. I think the dis­agree­ment might mostly be around a) how quickly ab­strac­tions break down, b) how much you still need them even once you un­der­stand.

  To be hon­est, I did bris­tle at some of the way things were phrased, but that’s on me. It felt like there was some kind of im­pli­ca­tion that I per­son­ally didn’t have any deeper un­der­stand­ing and that felt.

  That is, what’s go­ing on here is much deeper than it ap­pears to you, and if you keep push­ing to ex­plain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the be­liefs that power mo­ti­va­tions come from?” and “why do you even pre­fer one thing to an­other?“) you’ll see it ex­plode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t re­ally un­der­stand it be­fore” the same way you might think you un­der­stand how any com­plex sys­tem like a watch or a com­puter pro­gram works un­til you start liter­ally look­ing at the gears or elec­tri­cal cur­rents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good un­der­stand­ing be­fore given how lit­tle I re­ally un­der­stood”.

  This felt a like sleight since I think the post refer­ences much more de­tailed re­sources and even flags in the open­ing lines that what’s pre­sented is the “crud­est sim­plifi­ca­tion”. Yet quite pos­si­bly you were ad­dress­ing the hy­po­thet­i­cal reader rather than me. But even if not, still shouldn’t let that in­fluence my re­sponse too much. The ad­di­tion­als words of cau­tion about the limi­ta­tion of ab­strac­tions (es­pe­cially here) are worth­while. I re­gret per­haps that be­cause of these very long com­ments, read­ers might not see this point and our over­all agree­ment on it.

  Hmm, I do think the thing I haven’t ad­dressed here is more on my stance that bet­ter ab­strac­tions and bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of ab­strac­tions (some­thing I think is ne­glected in the do­main of self-un­der­stand and self-im­prove­ment) is ac­tu­ally key to us­ing lower-level un­der­stand­ing more sys­tem­at­i­cally and in a less ad-hoc way. Per­haps save that for an­other very long com­ment :P

  By the way, thanks for en­gag­ing so much. Don’t think I’ve ever dived into such a de­tailed dis­cus­sion.
  

• Ruby 3 Mar 2019 18:09 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  Thanks! It’s en­courag­ing words like those which keep me writ­ing.

  I’d say one of the things I at­tempt to do with my writ­ing (and in my think­ing too) is clar­ify the foun­da­tions suffi­ciently clearly that you can never for­get them and there­fore always ap­ply them ap­pro­pri­ately. I find that points that ini­tially feel ob­vi­ous to me are ac­tu­ally still a bit murky, haven’t been fully ab­sorbed, and there­fore I don’t ac­tu­ally use them or ap­pre­ci­ate their many ap­pli­ca­tions. Get­ting clear and ac­cu­rate ex­pla­na­tions (just for my­self) makes them ac­cessible enough to my mind that be­come a lot more use­ful.

  A fur­ther benefit and the origi­nal rea­son I found my­self do­ing this style of writ­ing is that clear foun­da­tions al­low you then to ex­press more com­pli­cated, profound, nu­anced pieces within a solid con­text. Be­ing clear on the foun­da­tions, at least for me, makes all the more ad­vanced pieces fall into place and seem much more nec­es­sary than if I had them on their own. Gives you a frame­work to hang things on. The make your cham­pion stronger vs make the com­pe­ti­tion weaker is an ex­am­ple of this.

  The over­all re­sult is a bunch of writ­ing that doesn’t reg­ister as par­tic­u­larly profound, but is very clear. Or so I’ve been told.

  My en­try point for this is ac­tu­ally think­ing and writ­ing about plan­ning. I’ve been writ­ing some­thing of a se­quence/​book on plan­ning and any prac­ti­cal plan­ning book for hu­mans would benefit greatly from a de­cent treat­ment of mo­ti­va­tion (and plan­ning around it). The in­sights/​mod­els in this post arose nat­u­rally from that con­text.

  With that back­ground, I think I can ex­plain why I dis­agree with many of your points.

  First, I agree that you get the model right, but it’s a model that is only very com­pel­ling from a cer­tain stage of de­vel­op­ment, my strongest ev­i­dence be­ing it was once very com­pel­ling to me and now it’s more like the kind of un­der­stand­ing I would have if I was asked to man­i­fest my un­der­stand­ing with­out ex­plain­ing be­low a cer­tain level of de­tail, and the other be­ing I think I’ve seen a similar pat­tern of dis­cov­er­ing this and then fo­cus­ing on other thing in the writ­ing of oth­ers. That doesn’t make any of it wrong or not use­ful, but it does sug­gest it’s rather limited, as I think fel­low com­menter Romeo also points out. That is, what’s go­ing on here is much deeper than it ap­pears to you, and if you keep push­ing to ex­plain the opaque parts of this model (like, “where do the be­liefs that power mo­ti­va­tions come from?” and “why do you even pre­fer one thing to an­other?“) you’ll see it ex­plode apart in a way that will make you go “oh, I had it right, but I didn’t re­ally un­der­stand it be­fore” the same way you might think you un­der­stand how any com­plex sys­tem like a watch or a com­puter pro­gram works un­til you start liter­ally look­ing at the gears or elec­tri­cal cur­rents and then say “oh, I’m amazed I even had such good un­der­stand­ing be­fore given how lit­tle I re­ally un­der­stood”.

  The in­sights in the post ex­ist at a cer­tain level of ab­strac­tion, as you say, it doesn’t man­i­fest un­der­stand­ing be­low a cer­tain level of de­tail. That’s quite in­ten­tional. I dis­agree that it is only com­pel­ling from a cer­tain stage of de­vel­op­ment or is rather limited. Far from it.

  I’ve been aware of un­der­ly­ing de­tails (just see the refer­ences) for a lot longer than I’ve ap­pre­ci­ated the high-level gen­eral points here be­cause I think the lower-level points eas­ily ob­scure the higher-level pic­ture. This is per­haps re­lated to your as­ser­tion that other writ­ers haven’t done jus­tice to the breadth of the ideas here. If you can’t stop think­ing about tran­sis­tors, you will find it hard to fo­cus on and fully ap­pre­ci­ate the boolean alge­bra you’re ex­e­cut­ing on your logic gates made out of tran­sis­tors. It’d be even harder to teach some­one to un­der­stand boolean alge­bra (let’s say min­i­miz­ing digi­tal cir­cuits) if you want them to keep tran­sis­tor op­er­a­tion in mind at all times. And if your ab­strac­tions are tight (not leaky) enough, you ac­tu­ally don’t need to un­der­stand the un­der­ly­ing com­plex­ity for them to be use­ful. Tran­sis­tors and logic gates are hu­man de­sign though. A bet­ter ex­am­ple might be un­der­stand­ing evolu­tion­ary se­lec­tion pro­cesses. If you can’t ab­stract away from the biolog­i­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion of sex­ual re­pro­duc­tion for a few min­utes, you’re likely to miss the higher-level pic­ture of why sex­ual re­pro­duc­tion is even a thing. What prob­lem was it try­ing to solve and what does it im­ply for the the im­ple­men­ta­tion?

  In this con­text though. Hmm. I think the in­sights/​mod­els here aren’t suffi­cient own their own to help you man­age your mo­ti­va­tion well, and per­haps that’s your point. The origi­nal post had to split into two parts be­cause adding in the fur­ther mod­els needed was go­ing to bal­loon out the post to six thou­sand words eas­ily. If you’re point is “there isn’t enough de­tail here to be prac­ti­cally use­ful”, that’s kind of true.

  A ma­jor hope for this piece is that if you ap­pre­ci­ate the ab­strac­tion at this level, you will un­der­stand why all the lower-level pieces look how they look. Many peo­ple have cre­ated lists of anti-akra­sia/​mo­ti­va­tion-en­hanc­ing tech­niques and also highly-de­tailed re­views of how mo­ti­va­tion work (just see Luke’s re­view). A goal with this post is that you see enough of the gen­eral pic­ture that it is clear why var­i­ous mo­ti­va­tion-tech­niques work and when they’re needed. If I launched into talk­ing about Heb­bian learn­ing and prospect the­ory, I as­sert you’d prob­a­bly miss the very de­sign prob­lem that its heart the mind/​mo­ti­va­tion sys­tem is try­ing to solve. Hence hold­ing off on that lower-level for other posts.

  Se­cond, just to set ex­pec­ta­tions, it’s un­for­tu­nately un­likely that hav­ing this model will ac­tu­ally help many peo­ple. Yes, it will definitely help some who are ready to see it, but years of try­ing to ex­plain my in­sights has taught me that one of the great frus­tra­tions is that fun­da­men­tal in­sights come in a par­tic­u­lar or­der, they build on each other, and the deeper you go the smaller the au­di­ence of peo­ple ex­plain­ing your in­sights to will help.

  I think I’m more op­ti­mistic than you about com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas, though per­haps I’m just suffi­ciently early in writ­ing “ca­reer” to be naive. I’m work­ing on the premise that suffi­ciently clear ex­pla­na­tions de­liv­ered sys­tem­i­cally in the write or­der can recre­ate in the minds of oth­ers much of the un­der­stand­ing you have in your own mind. That does re­quire peo­ple are will­ing to in­vest the time, but I think peo­ple do in­vest in read­ing writ­ing that is suffi­ciently en­joy­able and valuable-seem­ing.

• Ruby 1 Mar 2019 6:49 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  You’re right. Thanks for point­ing that out.

  Un­for­tu­nately, I couldn’t in­clude them in a sin­gle post of rea­son­able length. Tem­po­ral mo­ti­va­tion the­ory /​ the pro­cras­ti­na­tion equa­tion will fea­ture in the even­tual Part 2 to this post.

• Ruby 1 Mar 2019 3:15 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

  This is a good clar­ifi­ca­tion. Tech­ni­cally you’re right, you can main­tain mo­ti­va­tion so long as you reaf­firm com­mit­ment in each mo­ment you are tempted, which ad­mit­tedly might not ev­ery mo­ment (con­sider flow states).

  Though I’d still ar­gue that you should still be think­ing about caus­ing your­self to win in ev­ery mo­ment. You might main­tain mo­ti­va­tion through to the com­ple­tion of a task be­cause ei­ther: a) you suc­cess­fully reaf­firmed com­mit­ment, or b) no al­ter­na­tive can­di­date win­ner was sur­faced in a given mo­ment to be­gin with, yet it mat­ters that one of those is true for ev­ery mo­ment of nec­es­sary ex­e­cu­tion.

  Though not cov­ered prop­erly in this post, the even­tual goal here is to ex­plore how to en­g­ineer cir­cum­stances, both in­ter­nal and ex­ter­nal, so that you win in each mo­ment whether it be be­cause of a) or b). And that ap­plies to ev­ery mo­ment.

Mo­ti­va­tion: You Have to Win in the Mo­ment

• Ruby 28 Feb 2019 19:35 UTC

  10 points

  on: Ruby’s Short­form Feed

  Over the years, I’ve ex­pe­rienced a cou­ple of very dra­matic yet rather sud­den and rel­a­tively “easy” shifts around ma­jor pain points: strong aver­sions, strong fears, in­ner con­flicts, or painful yet deeply in­grained be­liefs. My post Iden­tities are [Sub­con­scious] Strate­gies con­tains ex­am­ples. It’s not sur­pris­ing to me that these are pos­si­ble, but my S1 says they’re sup­posed to re­quire a lot of effort: ma­jor ex­is­ten­tial crises, hours of in­tro­spec­tion, self-dis­cov­ery jour­neys, drug trips, or dozens of hours with a ther­a­pist.

  Have re­cently un­der­gone a re­ally big one, I noted my sur­prise again. Sur­prise, of course, is a prop­erty of bad mod­els. (Ac­tu­ally, the re­cent shift oc­curred pre­cisely be­cause of ex­actly this line of thought: I no­ticed I was sur­prised and dug in, lead­ing to an im­por­tant S1 shift. Your strength as a ra­tio­nal­ist and all that.) At­tempt­ing to come up with a model which wasn’t as sur­prised, this is what I’ve got:

  The shift in­volved S1 mod­els. The S1 mod­els had been there a long time, maybe a very long time. When that hap­pens, they be­gin to seem how the world just *is*. If emo­tions arise from those mod­els, and those mod­els are so en­trenched they be­come in­visi­ble as mod­els, then the emo­tions too be­gin to be taken for granted—a nat­u­ral way to feel about the world.

  Yet the longevity of the mod­els doesn’t mean that they’re deep, so­phis­ti­cated, or well-founded. That might be very sim­plis­tic such that they ig­nore a lot of real-world com­plex­ity. They might have been ac­quired in for­ma­tive years be­fore one learned much of their epistemic skill. They haven’t been re­viewed, be­cause it was hardly no­ticed that they were be­liefs/​mod­els rather than just “how the world is”.

  Now, if you have a good di­a­log with your S1, if your S1 is amenable to new ev­i­dence and rea­son­ing, then you can bring up the mod­els in ques­tion and dis­cuss them with your S1. If your S1 is healthy (and is not be­ing en­tan­gled with threats), it will be open to new ev­i­dence. It might very read­ily up­date in the face of that ev­i­dence. “Oh, ob­vi­ously the thing I’ve been think­ing was sim­plis­tic and/​or mis­taken. That ev­i­dence is in­com­pat­i­ble with the po­si­tion I’ve been hold­ing.” If the mod­els shift, then the feel­ings shift.

  Poor mod­els held by an epistem­i­cally healthy “agent” can rapidly change when pre­sented with the right ev­i­dence. This is per­haps not sur­pris­ing.

  Ac­tu­ally, I sus­pect that difficulty up­dat­ing of­ten comes from the S1 mod­els and in­stances of the broc­coli er­ror: “If I up­dated to like broc­coli then I would like broc­coli, but I don’t like broc­coli, so I don’t want that.” “If I up­dated that peo­ple aren’t out to get me then I wouldn’t be vigilant, which would be bad since peo­ple are out to get me.” Then the mere at­tempt to per­suade that broc­coli is pretty good /​ peo­ple are be­nign is per­ceived as threat­en­ing and hence re­sisted.

  So maybe a lot of S1 will­ing­ness to up­date is very de­pen­dent on S1 trust­ing that it is safe, that you’re not go­ing to take away any im­por­tant, pro­tec­tive be­liefs of mod­els.

  If there are oc­ca­sions where I achieve rather large shifts in my feel­ings from rel­a­tively lit­tle effort, maybe it is just that I’ve got­ten to a point where I’m good enough at lo­cat­ing the S1 mod­els/​be­liefs that are caus­ing in­ner con­flict, good enough at feel­ing safe mess­ing with my S1 mod­els, and good enough at pre­sent­ing the right rea­son­ing/​ev­i­dence to S1.

• Ruby 25 Feb 2019 1:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mingyuan's comment on: In­for­mal Post on Motivation

  Thanks, re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate that! Both the fixes and your thoughts. :) Up­dates me to­wards it be­ing worth­while to post things with lower lev­els of pol­ish rather than not at all.

In­for­mal Post on Motivation

Ruby’s Short-Form Feed

• Ruby 2 Feb 2019 4:26 UTC

  4 points

  on: From Per­sonal to Pri­son Gangs: En­forc­ing Proso­cial Behavior

  Good post! Thanks for writ­ing this, it adds ad­di­tional clar­ity and gen­er­al­ity to things I’ve been think­ing about re­cently.

• Ruby 13 Jan 2019 2:14 UTC

  10 points

  on: Com­bat vs Nur­ture & Meta-Contrarianism

  I’ve been at a work­shop and haven’t had much chance to en­gage with this post. Thanks for writ­ing it, it’s an ex­cel­lent re­ply and says many things bet­ter than I man­aged to. I es­pe­cially like hi­er­ar­chy which swings be­tween nur­ture and com­bat, that seem well de­scribed to me. Also strong en­dorse­ment for meet­ing con­ver­sa­tions where they’re at.

• Ruby 7 Jan 2019 23:39 UTC

  4 points

  on: Op­ti­miz­ing for Sto­ries (vs Op­ti­miz­ing Real­ity)

  I prob­a­bly didn’t em­pha­size this enough in the main post, but the idea I’m re­ally go­ing for is that there is differ­ence in op­ti­miz­ing for sto­ries vs. op­ti­miz­ing for re­al­ity. There’s a differ­ence in goal and in­ten­tion. Even if it’s the case that hu­man are never see­ing “rock-bot­tom re­al­ity” it­self and ev­ery­thing is me­di­ated through ex­pe­rience, there is still a big differ­ence be­tween a) some­one at­tempt­ing to change an as­pect of the un­der­ly­ing re­al­ity such that ac­tual differ­ent things hap­pen in the world, and b) some­one at­tempt­ing to change the judg­ments of an­other per­son by in­putting the right se­ries of bits into them.

  Op­ti­miz­ing sto­ries is re­ally about a mono-fo­cus on op­ti­miz­ing the spe­cific cor­ners of re­al­ity which ex­ists in­side hu­man heads.

• Ruby 7 Jan 2019 16:07 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid's comment on: Rationalization

  Oh, right. Once upon a time I knew that was the word. Thanks.

• Ruby 7 Jan 2019 8:35 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid's comment on: Rationalization

  I didn’t know that was the word for ex­cuse, but I think it’s an ex­cel­lent word it­self to use for ra­tio­nal­iza­tion. No syn­onym re­quired. ״רצה״ is the root for “want” and “הַתְרָצָה” is the the re­flex­ive con­ju­ga­tion, so it’s ap­prox­i­mately “self-want­ing.” Which is ex­actly what ra­tio­nal­iza­tion is—rea­son­ing to­wards what you want to be true.