toonalfrink

• toonalfrink 30 Jul 2020 8:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: Evan Rys­dam’s Shortform

  It might be hard to take a nor­ma­tive stance, but if cul­ture 1 makes you feel bet­ter AND leads to bet­ter re­sults AND helps peo­ple in­di­vi­d­u­ate and makes adults out of them, then maybe it’s just, y’know, bet­ter. Not “bet­ter” in the naive mis­take-the­o­rist as­sump­tion that there is such a thing as a moral truth, but “bet­ter” in the cor­rect con­flict-the­o­rist as­sump­tion that it just suits you and me and we will ex­ert our power to make it more widely adopted, for the sake of us and our en­light­ened ideals.

• toonalfrink 5 Jul 2020 14:36 UTC

  13 points

  on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  Case study: A sim­ple al­gorithm for fix­ing motivation

  So here I was, try­ing to read through an on­line course to learn about cloud com­put­ing, but I wasn’t re­ally ab­sorb­ing any of it. No mo­ti­va­tion.

  Mo­tives are a chain, end­ing in a ter­mi­nal goal. Lack of mo­ti­va­tion meant that my Sys­tem 1 did not be­lieve what I was do­ing would lead to achiev­ing any ter­mi­nal goal. The chain was bro­ken.

  So I tra­versed the chain to see which link was bro­ken.

  • Why was I do­ing the on­line course? Be­cause I want to be­come bet­ter at my job.

    • Do I still think do­ing the on­line course will make me bet­ter at my job? Yes I do.

    • Do I want to get bet­ter at my job? Nah, doesn’t spark joy.

  • Why do I want to get bet­ter at my job? Be­cause I want to get pro­moted.

    • Do I still think do­ing bet­ter will make me get pro­moted? Yes I do.

    • Do I want to get pro­moted? Nah, doesn’t spark joy.

  • Why do I want to get pro­moted? Be­cause (among other things) I want more in­fluence on my en­vi­ron­ment, for ex­am­ple by hav­ing more money.

    • Do I still think pro­mo­tion will give me more in­fluence? Yes I do

    • Do I want more in­fluence? Nah

  • Why do I want more in­fluence (via money)? Be­cause (among other things) I want to buy a house and do mee­tups, and live with close friends at the cen­ter of a vibrant com­mu­nity that helps people

    • Do I think more money will get me this house? Yes I do

    • Do I want to live with close friends at the cen­ter of a vibrant com­mu­nity that helps peo­ple? Well, usu­ally yes, but to­day I kind of just want to go to the beach with my gf, and de­com­press.

  • Well okay, but most days you do want this thing.

  • Shit you’re right, I do want to do this on­line course

  And mo­ti­va­tion was re­stored. Sud­denly, I feel in­vi­go­rated. To do the course, and to write this post.

  What links here?

  • elityre's comment on Eli’s short­form feed by elityre (23 Jul 2020 4:38 UTC; 2 points)

• toonalfrink 28 Jun 2020 20:58 UTC

  2 points

  on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  Ques­tion for the Ke­gan lev­els folks: I’ve no­ticed that I tend to regress to level 3 if I en­ter new en­vi­ron­ments that I don’t fully un­der­stand yet, and that this tends to cause men­tal is­sues be­cause I don’t always have the af­fir­ma­tive so­cial en­vi­ron­ment that level 3 needs. Do you re­late? How do you deal with this?

• toonalfrink 28 Jun 2020 19:34 UTC

  4 points

  on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  As some­one who never came across re­li­gion be­fore adult­hood, I’ve been try­ing to figure it out. Some of it’s claims seem pretty damn non­sen­si­cal, and yet some of it’s ad­her­ents seem pretty damn well-ad­justed and happy. The lat­ter means there’s gotta be some value in there.

  The most im­por­tant take­away so far is that re­li­gious claims make much more sense if you in­ter­pret them as phe­nomenolog­i­cal claims. Claims about the mind. When bud­dhists talk about the 6 wor­lds, they talk about 6 states of mood. When chris­ti­ans talk about a covenant with god, they talk about stick­ing to some kind of mind­set no mat­ter what.

  Back when this stuff was writ­ten, peo­ple didn’t seem to dis­t­in­guish be­tween ob­jec­tive re­al­ity and sub­jec­tive ex­pe­rience. The former is a mod­ern in­ven­tion. Either that, or this nu­ance has been lost in trans­la­tion over the cen­turies.

• toonalfrink 11 Jun 2020 7:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: toonalfrink’s comment on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  As for be­ing on ibo­gaine, a high dose isn’t fun for sure, but micro­doses are close to neu­tral and their ther­a­peu­tic value makes them net positive

• toonalfrink 11 Jun 2020 7:13 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: Swimmer963’s comment on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  Have you tried opi­ates? You don’t need to be in pain for it to make you feel great

• toonalfrink 4 Jun 2020 17:27 UTC

  13 points

  on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  Ibo­gaine seems to re­set opi­ate with­drawal. There are many sto­ries of peo­ple with 20 year old heroin ad­dic­tions that are cured within one ses­sion.

  If this is true, and there are no draw­backs, then we ba­si­cally have ac­cess to wire­head­ing. A hap­piness silver bul­let. It would be the hack of the cen­tury. Distribut­ing ibo­gaine + opi­ates would be the best known men­tal health in­ter­ven­tion by or­ders of mag­ni­tude.

  Of course, that’s only if there are no un­fore­seen caveats. Still, why isn’t ev­ery­body talk­ing about this?

• toonalfrink 2 Jun 2020 20:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Paul Crowley’s Shortform

  Did Do­minic Cum­mings in fact try a “Less Wrong ap­proach” to policy mak­ing? If so, how did it fail, and how can we learn from it? (if not, ig­nore this)

• toonalfrink 2 Jun 2020 20:42 UTC

  8 points

  on: toon­alfrink’s Shortform

  I did all the epistemic virtue. I rid my­self of my in­group bias. I ven­tured out on my own. I gen­er­ated in­de­pen­dent an­swers to ev­ery­thing. I went and un­der­stood the out­group. I im­mersed my­self in lots of cul­tures that win at some­thing, and I’ve found use­ful ex­tracts ev­ery­where.

  And now I’m alone. I don’t fully re­late to any­one in how I see the world, and it feels like the in­fer­en­tial dis­tance be­tween me and ev­ery­one else is ever in­creas­ing. I’ve lost mo­ti­va­tion for deep friend­ships, it just doesn’t seem com­pat­i­ble with learn­ing new things about the world. That sense of be­long­ing I got from LessWrong is gone too. There are a few things that LW/​EA just doesn’t un­der­stand well enough, and I haven’t been able to get it across.

  I don’t think I can bridge this gap. Even if I can put things to words, they’re too pro­vi­sional and com­pli­cated to be worth delv­ing into. Most of it isn’t di­rectly ac­tion­able. I can’t re­ally prove things yet.

  I’ve con­sid­ered go­ing back. Is lonely dis­sent worth it? Is there an end to this tun­nel?

[Question] Un­der which con­di­tions are hu­man be­ings most likely to be al­tru­is­ti­cally mo­ti­vated?

• toonalfrink 25 May 2020 20:19 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Is com­pe­ti­tion good?

  I don’t re­call, this is one of those con­cepts that you kind of as­sem­ble out of a bunch of con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple that already pre­sup­pose it

• toonalfrink 21 May 2020 22:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: What Money Can­not Buy

  Here’s an­other: prob­ing into their ar­gu­ment struc­ture a bit and check­ing if they can keep it from col­laps­ing un­der its own weight.

  https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​wyyfF­faRar2jEdeQK/​​en­tan­gled-truths-con­ta­gious-lies

• toonalfrink 21 May 2020 22:36 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: What Money Can­not Buy

  Prob­a­bly the skill of dis­cern­ing skill would be eas­ier to learn than… ev­ery sin­gle skill you’re try­ing to dis­cern.

• toonalfrink 21 May 2020 22:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Con­flict vs. mis­take in non-zero-sum games

  The out­group is evil, not ne­go­ti­at­ing in good faith, and it’s an er­ror to give them an inch. Con­flict the­ory is the cor­rect one for this de­ci­sion.

  Which out­group? Which de­ci­sion? Are you say­ing this is uni­ver­sally true?

Meetup #46 - Authen­tic Re­lat­ing games

Post-meetup social

Meetup #45 - Im­ple­men­ta­tion Intentions

Meetup #44 - Murphyjitsu

• toonalfrink 14 Jan 2020 19:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: “hu­man con­nec­tion” as col­lab­o­ra­tive epistemics

  Yes

• toonalfrink 13 Jan 2020 8:06 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: “hu­man con­nec­tion” as col­lab­o­ra­tive epistemics

  For­give me for stat­ing things more strongly than I mean them. It’s a bad habit of mine.

  I’m com­ing from the as­sump­tion that peo­ple are much more like Vul­cans than we give them credit for. Feel­ings are op­ti­miz­ers. Peo­ple that do things that aren’t in line with their stated goals, aren’t always bi­ased. In many cases they mis­state their goals but don’t ac­tu­ally fail to achieve them.

  See my last short­form for more on this