Unreal

• Unreal 15 Jul 2019 22:41 UTC

  13 points

  on: In­tegrity and ac­countabil­ity are core parts of rationality

  This post is rele­vant to my post on Depend­abil­ity.

  I’m at MAPLE in or­der to ac­quire a cer­tain level of in­tegrity in my­self.

  The high-reach­ing goal is to ac­quire a level of in­tegrity that isn’t much-in­fluenced by short/​medium-term in­cen­tives, such that I can trust my­self to be in in­tegrity even when I’m not in an en­vi­ron­ment that’s con­ducive for that.

  But that’s prob­a­bly a long way off, and in the mean­time, I am just work­ing on how to be the kind of per­son that can show up on time to things and say what needs to be said when it’s scary and take re­spon­si­bil­ity for my mis­takes and stuff.

  I thumbs-up any­one who at­tempts to be­come more in in­tegrity over time! Seems su­per worth­while.

• Unreal 14 May 2019 3:01 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Unreal's comment on: The Village and The Mission

  I’m re­al­iz­ing that I need to make the fol­low­ing dis­tinc­tion here:

  Village 1) There is a core of folks in the village that are do­ing a hard thing (Mis­sion). and also their friends, fam­ily, and neigh­bors who sup­port them and each other but are not di­rectly in­volved in the Mis­sion.

  Village 2) There is a village with only ppl who are do­ing the di­rect Mis­sion work. Other friends, fam­ily, etc. do not make their homes in the village.

  I weakly think it’s pos­si­ble for 1 to be good.

  I think 2 runs into lots of prob­lems and is what my origi­nal com­ment was speak­ing against.

• Unreal 12 May 2019 23:33 UTC

  27 points

  on: The Village and The Mission

  [ com­ment copied from Face­book /​ I didn’t read the full ar­ti­cle be­fore mak­ing this com­ment ]

  i am some­what anti-”Mis­sion-cen­tered Village.”

  i think en­tan­gle­ment be­tween mis­sion and liveli­hood already causes prob­lems. (you start feel­ing that the mis­sion is good b/​c it feeds you, and that an at­tack on the mis­sion is an at­tack on your abil­ity to feed your­self /​ earn in­come)

  en­tan­gle­ment be­tween mis­sion and fam­ily/​home seems like it causes more of those prob­lems. (you start feel­ing that if your home is threat­ened in any way, this is a threat to the mis­sion, and if you feel that your mis­sion is threat­ened, it is a threat to your home.)

  avoid­ing men­tal /​ emo­tional en­tan­gle­ment in this way i think would re­quire a very high bar: a mind well-trained in the art of { in­tro­spec­tion /​ med­i­ta­tion /​ small-iden­tity /​ sur­ren­der /​ re­lin­quish­ment } or some­thing in that area. i sus­pect <10 ppl in the com­mu­nity to meet that bar?

• Unreal 12 May 2019 23:32 UTC

  13 points

  on: The Village and The Mission

  [ com­ment copied from Face­book /​ I didn’t read the full ar­ti­cle be­fore mak­ing this com­ment ]

  agree with a lot of this, esp the part about not try­ing to wel­come ev­ery­one /​ lower bar­rier to en­try to the point that there’s no com­mit­ment in­volved

  i think a suc­cess­ful village will re­quire a fair amount of com­mit­ment and sac­ri­fice, in terms of time, effort, op­por­tu­nity cost, and prob­a­bly money

  if ev­ery­one is look­ing to max­i­mize their own in­ter­ests, while pur­su­ing a village, i think this will drain re­sources to the point that noth­ing gets done or things fall apart. a weak struc­ture will beget a frag­ile village. and i think a frag­ile village can eas­ily be net harm­ful.

  at the same time, it’s good to be con­sid­er­ate to peo­ple who can’t con­tribute a whole lot due to dis­abil­ity or fi­nan­cial in­se­cu­rity.

• Unreal 8 Apr 2019 17:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: Dependability

  Hmm I won­der if there’s some­thing about med­i­ta­tion in a monas­tic set­ting where all the rules need to be strived to be fol­lowed that does some­thing.

  Be­cause I’m pretty sure a num­ber of the res­i­dents of the monastery here have be­come much more re­li­able af­ter a year or two of be­ing here.

  It might be con­text-de­pen­dent too, but I seem to not be wor­ried about that prob­lem as much for me. I feel above-av­er­age at the gen­er­al­iza­tion skill and think I can take some use­ful things out of a spe­cific con­text into other con­texts.

• Unreal 30 Mar 2019 12:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Original_Seeing's comment on: Dependability

  I don’t think I’ve prop­erly con­veyed what I mean by Depend­abil­ity, judg­ing by the to­tal­ity of the com­ments. Or, maybe I’ve con­veyed what I mean by Depend­abil­ity, but I did not prop­erly ex­plain that I want to achieve it in a spe­cific way. I’m look­ing to gain the skill through com­pas­sion and equa­nim­ity. A monas­tic lifestyle seems ap­pro­pri­ate for this.

  I also did not at all ex­plain why I’m speci­fi­cally dis­ad­van­taged in this area, com­pared to the av­er­age per­son. And I think that would bring clar­ity too, if I ex­plained that.

• Unreal 28 Mar 2019 19:58 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: drethelin's comment on: Dependability

  I will try to ex­plain where my dis­agree­ment is.

  1. Con­cept space is huge. There are more con­cepts than there are words for con­cepts. (There are many pos­si­ble frames from which to con­cep­tu­al­ize a con­cept too, which con­tinues to ex­plode the num­ber of ways to think about any given con­cept.)

  2. When­ever I try to ‘coin’ a term, I’m not try­ing to re­define an old con­cept. I have a new con­cept, of­ten be­long­ing in a par­tic­u­lar new frame. This new con­cept con­tains a lot of nu­ance and speci­fic­ity, differ­ent from any old words or con­cepts. I want to re­lay MY con­cept, which con­tains and im­plies a bunch of mod­els I have about the world. Old words would fail to cap­ture any of this—and would also fail to prop­erly im­ply that I want to re­lay some­thing con­fus­ingly but mean­ingfully pre­cise.

  3. I’m not ‘mak­ing up’ these con­cepts from noth­ing. I’m not ‘think­ing of ways to add com­plex­ity’ to con­cepts. My con­cepts are already that com­plex. I’m merely shar­ing a con­cept I already have, that is com­ing forth from my in­ter­nal, im­plicit mod­els—and I try to make them ex­plicit so oth­ers can know what con­cepts I already im­plic­itly, sub­con­sciously use to con­cep­tu­al­ize the world. And my con­cepts are unique be­cause the set of mod­els I have are differ­ent from yours. And when I feel I’ve got a con­cept that feels par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant in some way, I want to share it.

  4. I want to un­der­stand peo­ple’s true, im­plicit con­cepts—which are prob­a­bly always full of nu­ance and im­plicit mod­els. I am end­lessly in­ter­ested in peo­ple’s pre­cise, unique con­cepts. It’s like get­ting a deep taste of some­one’s wor­ld­view in a sin­gle bite-sized piece. I like get­ting tastes of peo­ple’s wor­ld­views be­cause ev­ery­one has a unique set of mod­els and data, and that com­plex­ity is re­flected in their con­cepts. Their con­cepts—which always start im­plicit and non­ver­bal, if they can learn to ver­bal­ize them and com­mu­ni­cate them—are rich and lay­ered. And I want them. (Also I think it is a very, very valuable skill to be able to ex­pli­cate your im­plicit con­cepts and mod­els. LessWrong seems like a good place to prac­tice.)

  5. “But what about build­ing upon hu­man knowl­edge, which re­quires cre­at­ing a shared lan­guage? What about figur­ing out which con­cepts are best and build­ing on those?” I agree this is a good goal to have. The plat­form of LessWrong is already built to prune con­cept space (with mul­ti­ple ways for con­cepts to be pro­moted or de­moted).

  But I do think this goal is “at odds” with my goal of shar­ing my con­cepts, learn­ing oth­ers’ con­cepts, and div­ing into the depths of con­cept space. What I want here is to be in the “white­board­ing” phase where lots of ideas and thoughts are al­lowed to sur­face, and maybe it’s their first time re­ally see­ing the light, but I get feed­back, and other peo­ple have as­so­ci­ated thoughts and share those. And it’s a gen­er­a­tive sort of phase, rather than a prun­ing phase.

  It seems plau­si­ble my posts should stay in my ‘blog’ and off the front page? I don’t fully un­der­stand the point of front page vs blog per­son­ally. But I’d be happy to keep my posts in the cor­ner of “my blog” and do the ‘white­board­ing’ thing there.

  If any of the mods want to dis­cuss this dilemma with me (I’d pre­fer do­ing this offline), I’d be into get­ting more opinions on this.

• Unreal 27 Mar 2019 4:37 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: Dependability

  There’s some over­lap with con­scien­tious­ness, but de­pend­abil­ity doesn’t in­clude be­ing or­ga­nized, be­ing effi­cient, car­ing about achieve­ment or perfec­tion, be­ing hard­work­ing, be­ing care­ful, be­ing thor­ough, or ap­pear­ing com­pe­tent.

  Grit seems im­por­tant for try­ing and fol­low-through in par­tic­u­lar!

• Unreal 27 Mar 2019 0:11 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: drethelin's comment on: Dependability

  I guess I dis­agree :P

Dependability

• Unreal 24 Mar 2019 6:36 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity vs Open Curiosity

  I’ve been watch­ing a bunch of videos on this, and I’m find­ing them quite in­ter­est­ing so far.

  http://​​iain­m­cgilchrist.com/​​videos/​​

  Also I agree lots of pre­ci­sion and dis­cern­ment are use­ful to main­tain here. It could get “floppy” real fast if peo­ple aren’t care­ful with their con­cepts /​ mod­els.

• Unreal 22 Mar 2019 6:57 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: TheWakalix's comment on: Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

  Con­no­ta­tions of Rest that I find rele­vant:

  • lack of anxiety

  • PSNS activation

  • re­laxed body (while not nec­es­sar­ily in­ac­tive or pas­sive body)

  • a state that you can be in in­definitely, in the­ory (whereas Re­cover sug­gests tem­po­rary)

  • med­i­ta­tive (vs med­ica­tive)

  • not try­ing to do any­thing /​ not need­ing any­thing (whereas Re­cover sug­gests goal ori­en­ta­tion)

  • Rest feels more sa­cred than Re­cov­ery

  Con­cept that I want ac­cess to that “Re­cover” doesn’t fit as well with:

  • In­cor­po­rat­ing Rest into work and ev­ery­day life (see: Rest in Mo­tion)

• Unreal 21 Mar 2019 19:42 UTC

  10 points

  on: Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity vs Open Curiosity

  Ian McGilchrist came out a book on brain hemi­spheres and their spe­cial­ized roles called The Master and His Emis­sary. This sum­mary was use­ful: https://​​www.red­dit.com/​​r/​​strea­men­try/​​com­ments/​​b39n4x/​​the_di­vided_brain_and_awak­en­ing_the­o­rycommu­nity/​​

  The Left Hemi­sphere han­dles nar­row fo­cus (like a bird try­ing to pick out a seed among a bunch of peb­bles and dirt), while the Right Hemi­sphere han­dles broad, open fo­cus (the same bird keep­ing some at­ten­tion on the back­ground for preda­tors). The LH is as­so­ci­ated with tool use and ma­nipu­la­tion of ob­jects. The RH is as­so­ci­ated with ex­plo­ra­tion and ex­pe­ri­en­tial data gath­er­ing.

  I don’t im­me­di­ately know how the hemi­spheres may be in­volved in the types of Cu­ri­os­ity. But a plau­si­ble hy­poth­e­sis might be that Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity would be more left-brained and Open Cu­ri­os­ity would be more right-brained.

• Unreal 21 Mar 2019 1:28 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

  It’s not that you’re just do­ing what­ever you “feel” like, in a generic sense. You’re do­ing some­thing like Fo­cus­ing on your stom­ach in particular

  Yes, this is right.

  I also do pre­dict the stom­ach is where most peo­ple should be Fo­cus­ing on, for get­ting proper Rest. I think there’s some kind of on­go­ing bat­tle be­tween the head and the stom­ach, and peo­ple/​so­ciety tends to fa­vor the head.

  But I get mileage out of do­ing Fo­cus­ing on all kinds of ar­eas.

• Unreal 21 Mar 2019 1:05 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Aiyen's comment on: Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

  So some very gen­eral links (since ‘im­prov­ing pro­duc­tivity on chores and fu­ture plan­ning’ sounds like it could mean a lot of things):

  • De­sign­ing your life so that your at­ten­tion is ex­actly where you want it to be nat­u­rally: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​HHjn3r8n7bJp6Q5HE/​​ham­mer­time-day-4-design

  • Rest­ing in mo­tion: http://​​mind­in­gour­way.com/​​rest-in-mo­tion/​​

  • Marie Kondo’s meth­ods seem pretty good for get­ting chores done /​ ac­tively want­ing to do them (I felt mo­ti­vated watch­ing her Net­flix spe­cial): https://​​www.livible.com/​​blog/​​ul­ti­mate-kon­mari-guide/​​

  • Gen­eral post on pro­duc­tivity: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​P3zrurj5hHKFKDL3M/​​pro­duc­tivity-work­ing-to­wards-a-sum­mary-of-what-we-know

  • Im­ple­ment­ing some­thing like a Get­ting Things Done sys­tem: https://​​zenkit.com/​​en/​​blog/​​a-be­gin­ners-guide-to-get­ting-things-done/​​

  Over­all, I’ve got­ten large gains out of de­sign­ing my life such that work feels like wa­ter flow­ing down­hill rather than me try­ing to trudge up­hill.

  I use Policy-Based In­ten­tions a fair amount, as a way to save willpower. I’m like a game de­signer try­ing to de­sign the maze that my mouse is run­ning in, if that makes sense. And I try to make it easy for the mouse to make the cor­rect de­ci­sions de­pend­ing on the situ­a­tion.

• Unreal 20 Mar 2019 19:33 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala's comment on: Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

  I think Kaj is right. But in gen­eral, video games /​ TV feel like they help me es­cape the pre­sent mo­ment, avoid think­ing about some­thing or feel­ing my body, and keep me in my head. Video games also have that feel­ing of fake pro­duc­tivity which makes them feel like a com­pul­sive “pre­tend work.” (Aka pica.)

  I guess I also should have dis­t­in­guished “read­ing for plea­sure” and “pro­duc­tive read­ing.” I was ad­vo­cat­ing for the former and not so much the lat­ter.

  Once, I did a spon­ta­neous pic­nic where I put a blan­ket out­side some­where nice and brought a bas­ket of food and a book. And I just lounged out­side, read­ing [An­nihila­tion] and eat­ing and look­ing at na­ture. If I imag­ine hav­ing TV in­stead, I feel like I lose the abil­ity to choose where my at­ten­tion goes freely. With a book, I can pause or day­dream and take my time with it more eas­ily.

  But re­ally it’s up to you what counts as Rest­ful. I can imag­ine watch­ing video in­ter­views Rest­ful for some rea­son. Or listen­ing to pod­casts. I’m less sure what Rest­ful video games for me would be.

• Unreal 20 Mar 2019 19:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: cousin_it's comment on: Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

  I would ex­per­i­ment with that in the fol­low­ing ways:

  • Try not do­ing any pro­jects and see how that is (This seems good for what Zvi /​ Ben de­scribe as an emer­gency check /​ Sab­bath as alarm.)

  • When you feel like work­ing on a pro­ject, do so but pe­ri­od­i­cally check “Do I still feel good about do­ing this right now? Is this yummy? Do I want to be do­ing this?” Do the check and then fol­low what seems good in the mo­ment.

Rest Days vs Re­cov­ery Days

• Unreal 17 Mar 2019 0:07 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: ESRogs's comment on: Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity vs Open Curiosity

  Open cu­ri­os­ity does not ac­tively seek to un­der­stand. Which is why I call the other one ‘ac­tive’.

  I sus­pect con­cen­trated and diffuse cu­ri­os­ity are both refer­ring to types of ac­tive cu­ri­os­ity. Open cu­ri­os­ity is talk­ing about some­thing differ­ent.

Ac­tive Cu­ri­os­ity vs Open Curiosity