Considering motives is something that might be worth exploring in a higher-effort and more fleshed-out post, which this one is not. I do want to note that the Hufflepuff-Slytherin quote was from someone who I think would consider themselves a Hufflepuff, so read to me as a warning rather than a threat (and also was quoted to me second-hand, so I’m pretty uncertain about exact wording and don’t want to speculate based on it.)
Swimmer963
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This seems like partly a critique of unstrategic loyalty and unquestioned ideals rather than idealism per se, and (to my brain at least) partly like a type error – in my mind, the point of having ideals isn’t at all that they will reward you.
I think this is fair re: loyalty to people – it’s a red flag if you find yourself being loyal to someone who treats you badly, and falling into that pattern is a pitfall of being someone with a strong tendency to loyalty. Re: entities/institutions, I think it’s more complicated, since I don’t think modern institutions are generally capable of “being loyal back”.
I’m glad you made this comment (even though I confess it’s a bit triggering, but I’m going to try my best to respond calmly). I think it’s useful for clarifying what I mean, which I hadn’t disclaimered very much because this post was pretty low-effort.
I agree that Eddie-as-written is very unstrategic, and also unreflective, in that he doesn’t show the capacity to question his own drives. He doesn’t attempt to model the world around him and the actual impacts of his actions at all (e.g. I don’t think we ever see him thinking in a consequentialist way.) Loyalty as a trait + not trying to question your decision process does seem very dangerous, but I’m not convinced it’s dangerous in a fundamentally different way from, say, intelligence or strength or social savvy combined with not questioning one’s decision process. Any capacity-to-do-stuff applied in a random or not-well-thought-out direction, or especially in a direction manipulated by an adversarial agent, is likely to be harmful.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by keeping loyalty “in your core identity”. The thing I mean to convey is that a) I want to recognize that I have a significant drive towards loyalty, and b) I don’t have a moral obligation to rip that part out of my soul and rebuild my motivation system from scratch. Which is different from saying I don’t have a moral duty to check whether I’m actually doing the right things. My higher-level ethical framework isn’t one where loyalty is fundamental, I do try to check, and I’ve in fact broken loyalty bonds multiple times after reassessing.
I think I’m not an “obligate-loyal” person, I in fact have other drives and can function to a reasonable capacity through other sources of motivation; this is arguably what I’m doing right now, and I can’t claim that it was always deliberate but I think I’ve ended up “slacking” when my S1 wasn’t sure if a leader or institution was worth being loyal to. (I’m leaning towards thinking that loyalty-to-modern-institutions is almost always a misfiring of the drive, and have the start of a post on that.) Embracing my desire-to-be-loyal as part of me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be an important driver in the near term; it may be that the current world doesn’t offer actually-good avenues for this, for the reasons you pointed out, and I’m better off being slightly-less-fully-alive in exchange for not being loyalty-bound to an institution that might be harmful. But, just...yeah, I guess I like the framing in your subsequent comment. Maybe there’s a thing wrong with the world, but I’m no longer willing to let people tell me that this is something fundamentally wrong with me.
Reclaiming Eddie Willers
Wow! That...is not a thing that I would have expected to exist. I guess it makes sense, if it in fact depends on relatively few variables.
I’ve had The Inner Game of Tennis on my recommended list for several years, as a general rationality-related book; clearly I should just go ahead and read it!
I did a quick Google for you, and it looks like there are a lot of apps for Android that are similar (though I can’t speak to which of them are actually good).
Micro feedback loops and learning
I’ve noticed in the past that I feel aversion to saying (and especially writing down) things that “might be false” – where I’m low confidence, where I expect that I just don’t have the information to do more than speculate wildly.
When I try to introspect on this, I do think some of it is fear of being wrong in public (and this feeling definitely responds to local social incentives – I’m more likely to be comfortable rambling without a filter in private with close friends, and in fact do this a bunch.)
I think there are also other pieces. I’m wary that it’s hard for humans to incorporate epistemic status tags and actually take my thoughts less seriously if I say I’m very uncertain. I’m also wary of...crystallizing a theory about something, and then becoming vulnerable to confirmation bias as I try to test it against observations? (This worry is stronger in areas where it feels hard to actually get feedback from reality.) As you point out, though, the tradeoff there is giving up on improving understanding.
I suspect I’m a lot less averse to low-confidence-speculation in private than I was several years ago, and it’s partly because I think it’s good for developing understanding, and partly just because I feel more comfortable socially and have less anticipation of being shut down.
(Also want to note that in general I have only moderate confidence in my introspection on stuff like this, and this comment is mostly a ramble.)
Brandon Sanderson’s writings tend to be quite decent.
I’d thought about putting the Mistborn series in the “things that are close to what I’m talking about”, but I’ve only read 2⁄3 of the first book.
the explanation for the original villain remaining largely technically incompetent is rather contrived and hand-waved.
I’d forgotten about that. I think maybe I assumed the incompetent-villain characters were finding ways to skimp on the training that was supposed to be required?
Examples of growth mindset or practice in fiction
Verbal communication is much harder for people than written.
Um, this is really not universally true at all. In fact, it’s possible more than 50% of people find verbal communication easier. (Although this community may contain an overrepresentation of people who find written easier.)
Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.
Citation?
Have you read many of the “gritty crime novel” or other “gritty realism” genres? I think I have a felt sense for what that narrative is, but it’s hard to explain, because it comes from having read several hundred books in the genre.
Hmm. I’m going to suggest something that I just thought of and that may or may not be helpful, but here goes:
The trouble with narratives is that once you have one, it’s really hard to go back to not having a narrative. Heroism is a narrative. It’s going to be really hard to go back to just doing whatever you were doing without interpreting it in some kind of narrative sense – but you can change your narrative. To something like “there are no heroes.” Heroism is a construct, a concept, but it doesn’t cut reality at the joints. The real world is more like one of those gritty crime novels, where morality isn’t a real thing and there are just humans, with drives both noble and corrupt, trying to survive.
This is a narrative I’ve had, but it wasn’t to solve the same problem. I have my couch-potato urges, like anyone, but I’ve never had to resort to much mental violence to suppress them. I think because I’m able to notice that when I follow the urges, and read sci-fi for ten hours instead of cooking and exercising and cleaning, then I feel physically bad (stiff, achy, etc), and mentally bad (foggy head, being bored but unable to think of a thing to do about it, etc). This is visceral enough feedback for my System 1 to get it and respond to an urge to stay in bed and read my book all day with “do you really want to do that?” (The prerequisite for this may be having good enough energy and mood overall that doing non-couch-potato things is pleasant or at least bearable. I’ve experienced times when this wasn’t the case – when I was so exhausted that trying to do anything other than read fanfic was painful. If trying to do work is always aversive for you, that may well be a medical issue – it’d be consistent with depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.)
This blog post discusses a study using a construct called “clerical intelligence”; I wonder if low clerical intelligence is the sort of thing that would cause someone to be good at math “conceptually” but keep making frustrating mistakes in practice.
Ooh! I think ‘clerical intelligence’ is the thing that my husband and I have taken to calling ‘attention to detail’ amongst ourselves. It’s also been at least occasionally studied under that name – when applying for an admin job, they gave me a test of ‘attention to detail’ that consisted of several hundred timed questions comparing a block of six numbers to another block, having to answer whether they were the same or not, with around 5-10 seconds to spend per question. I don’t think I’m outright bad at this, but it’s not effortless for me. (Luckily, I had math teachers who gave points for the work getting to the solution, not just the solution, so I could get 7⁄8 points on a complicated problem even if I substituted a + for a—somewhere and got the wrong answer).
My husband tends to use ‘attentional to detail’ to some degree also to mean what Paul Graham would call ‘taste’ or what Jonah would call ‘aesthetic discernment’. I think the causal relationship is probably that in order to develop ‘taste’–intuitions for what’s good that correspond to what’s generally agreed to be good – you need to be paying close attention to its details for a few years. Thus I have ‘taste’ for music, writing, and to some degree math, but not for fashion, since I never looked at what people were wearing.
That’s really interesting! Are you able to break down the relevant skills at all?
I actually had a nightmare recently where I was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and would have preferred not to go through treatment, but felt pressured by other, more aggressively anti-death members of the rationality community. Was afraid people would think I didn’t care about them if I didn’t try to stay alive longer to be with them, etc. (I’m an ICU nurse; I have a pretty good S1 handle on how horrific a lot of life saving treatments are, and how much quality of life it’s possible to lose.)
I’ve thought about cryonics, but haven’t made a decision either way; right now, my feeling is that I don’t have anything against the principle, but that it doesn’t seem likely enough to work for the cost-benefit analysis to come out positive.
...I wrote that post, so yes, I’ve already read most of the comments.
Clarification: I’m not actually planning to do unpaid work for Ruby, at least not immediately. I’m going to be retraining as an executive assistant, because they’re useful, and keeping my nursing license valid (possibly finding a part time nursing job if that turns out to be at all feasible, because I really love working as a nurse.)
On 2) I agree, but I think this is true of pretty much any “virtue” you could name – ambition, curiosity, kindness, humility, honesty/candor, etc. As you point out, no virtue is sufficient by itself, and no extreme is effective without some balance of the others. (Though I contest the fact that naive hufflepuffism doesn’t already include some goal-seeking; caring about getting shit done is a pretty core Hufflepuff trait, and one Eddie Willers has in spades, though of course it may not be strategic or aimed in a useful direction). The main claim I’m making is that loyalty is a virtue the same way e.g. honesty is – not sufficient in itself, harmful if followed unstrategically and unquestioned, but good to have at all.
Another claim I’m making, though it wasn’t very explicit here, is that there’s not a single “right amount” of loyalty-drive to have. There’s going to be a range where it’s balanced with other traits and adaptive, different people are going to fall in different places on that spectrum, and that’s fine. I have a high enough innate-drive-to-loyalty that I really don’t need to cultivate more of it on purpose; it makes more sense to cultivate traits like ambition and self-efficacy that will help balance it; but I also don’t think I should hammer that drive out of myself.