I’m midway through your post and I want to say that I’ve also been deep in Mad Investor Chaos. In addition to loving it, I am very inspired by it. Inspired to look for ways to improve my thinking. Looking for things I’m flinching away from—and narrow in on those things for inspection. I keep asking myself—what is it that I already know about the world that I’m pretending not to see? What are things that I can expect to believe later that I should just update and believe now?
I imagine your writing style here reminds me of the manic way of the characters figuring Law out in Mad Investor Chaos, and I like it. I really appreciate you for writing how despite verbally agreeing that modesty is unproductive, you nevertheless never judged high-status people as dumb. That’s totally the kind of noticing/Law I imagine we need more of. And I also imagine this is the sort of mindset Eliezer is looking for—the mindset where you figure those things out unprompted, without an Eliezer there to correct you. And I also judge that in your case, even though you could say you are being prompted—by your desire for validation—well, that’s good enough.
I really appreciate you for writing how despite verbally agreeing that modesty is unproductive, you nevertheless never judged high-status people as dumb. That’s totally the kind of noticing/Law I imagine we need more of.
And I also imagine this is the sort of mindset Eliezer is looking for—the mindset where you figure those things out unprompted, without an Eliezer there to correct you.
I find this comment kind of aggravating.
I’ll claim that the very mindset you mention starts with not taking Eliezer at face value when he half-implies he’s the only person producing useful alignment research on earth, an that his ability to write an angry rant about hopeless it all is proves that everyone else is a follower drone because they didn’t write the rant first.
Like, I think Eliezer deserves a lot of respect, and I’m aware I’m caricaturing him a bit, but… not that much?
I don’t even think I disagree with you in substance. The mindset of thinking for yourself is useful, etc. But part of that mindset is to not unironically quote everything Eliezer says about how smart he is.
Inspired to look for ways to improve my thinking. Looking for things I’m flinching away from—and narrow in on those things for inspection. I keep asking myself—what is it that I already know about the world that I’m pretending not to see?
I have more skill to gain here, even now. Recently, I had a date scheduled, but then my date seemed to indicate she wanted to make it more of a group outing. I thought, “Wasn’t this supposed to be, you know, a date for the two of us?”, but I became distracted by other matters, like “Why are my COVID tests showing bright positives on day 11 after my first positive, aren’t I supposed to be low viral load by now?! Did I get sick again?”
I was feeling overwhelmed, and my “Your cognition is compromised” alert popped up. I entered a more epistemically sturdy frame of mind. That part of my cognition told me:
You are trying to deny the fact that any reasonable assessment of the situation indicates that you are highly infectious and cannot be around other people. You will have to isolate again. This is true. Accept it.
You are trying to deny the fact that you will not be able to attend the research retreat this weekend. It won’t happen. Accept that, too.
Also, your date is no longer romantically interested in you. You know that perfectly well, but don’t want to think it because it’s painful. You can thank me later when I’m right.
That part of me was right on all three counts. While my exception-handling did activate and I did realize those three facts within my own brain, without external help, I’d like to get to the point where my main train of thought doesn’t need such obvious correction from a particular other part of me.
(Also, although my internal voice may seem unkind in this situation, in the moment it didn’t feel mean or harmful. Please do not cultivate edgy, hurtful inner voices within yourself, dear reader, because you come away from this comment with the impression that internal edginess → better epistemics.)
I realized I had the “I’m not a math person” false narrative a few months ago! Which I imagine comes from a higher-level belief I learned super early on, that runs parallel to the “I’m in a story in which I’m the hero” delusion. That (almost subconscious) belief is something like “if I’m not instantly amazing at something then I suck and I should give up”.
But it’s not even that well defined. I’m more muddled than that.
It could be a barely-conscious rationalization for something closer to “I don’t like how I feel when I fail, it hurts my identity that I’m bright and special and the hero of the story, so I’ll stop trying, stop looking at it, and when prompted I’ll have a new identity-piece ready: ‘I’m-not-an-X-person’”.
I’ve now tried making a new identity-piece story that’ll help (feedback welcome if there’s a flaw to it that I missed). It goes something like—“I expect that when I learn something new I will suck at it, and that’s OK”. I realize this could lead to me persisting in things I’m genuinely terrible at when I should instead put my energy on something different. So I have a safeguard mindset that goes “get feedback from people who won’t be scared to hurt you, and evaluate if you should be doing something else to achieve the goal.”
I’m midway through your post and I want to say that I’ve also been deep in Mad Investor Chaos. In addition to loving it, I am very inspired by it.
Inspired to look for ways to improve my thinking. Looking for things I’m flinching away from—and narrow in on those things for inspection.
I keep asking myself—what is it that I already know about the world that I’m pretending not to see? What are things that I can expect to believe later that I should just update and believe now?
I imagine your writing style here reminds me of the manic way of the characters figuring Law out in Mad Investor Chaos, and I like it.
I really appreciate you for writing how despite verbally agreeing that modesty is unproductive, you nevertheless never judged high-status people as dumb. That’s totally the kind of noticing/Law I imagine we need more of.
And I also imagine this is the sort of mindset Eliezer is looking for—the mindset where you figure those things out unprompted, without an Eliezer there to correct you. And I also judge that in your case, even though you could say you are being prompted—by your desire for validation—well, that’s good enough.
Anyway, back to reading.
I find this comment kind of aggravating.
I’ll claim that the very mindset you mention starts with not taking Eliezer at face value when he half-implies he’s the only person producing useful alignment research on earth, an that his ability to write an angry rant about hopeless it all is proves that everyone else is a follower drone because they didn’t write the rant first.
Like, I think Eliezer deserves a lot of respect, and I’m aware I’m caricaturing him a bit, but… not that much?
I don’t even think I disagree with you in substance. The mindset of thinking for yourself is useful, etc. But part of that mindset is to not unironically quote everything Eliezer says about how smart he is.
I have more skill to gain here, even now. Recently, I had a date scheduled, but then my date seemed to indicate she wanted to make it more of a group outing. I thought, “Wasn’t this supposed to be, you know, a date for the two of us?”, but I became distracted by other matters, like “Why are my COVID tests showing bright positives on day 11 after my first positive, aren’t I supposed to be low viral load by now?! Did I get sick again?”
I was feeling overwhelmed, and my “Your cognition is compromised” alert popped up. I entered a more epistemically sturdy frame of mind. That part of my cognition told me:
That part of me was right on all three counts. While my exception-handling did activate and I did realize those three facts within my own brain, without external help, I’d like to get to the point where my main train of thought doesn’t need such obvious correction from a particular other part of me.
(Also, although my internal voice may seem unkind in this situation, in the moment it didn’t feel mean or harmful. Please do not cultivate edgy, hurtful inner voices within yourself, dear reader, because you come away from this comment with the impression that internal edginess → better epistemics.)
More comments-
I realized I had the “I’m not a math person” false narrative a few months ago!
Which I imagine comes from a higher-level belief I learned super early on, that runs parallel to the “I’m in a story in which I’m the hero” delusion. That (almost subconscious) belief is something like “if I’m not instantly amazing at something then I suck and I should give up”.
But it’s not even that well defined. I’m more muddled than that.
It could be a barely-conscious rationalization for something closer to “I don’t like how I feel when I fail, it hurts my identity that I’m bright and special and the hero of the story, so I’ll stop trying, stop looking at it, and when prompted I’ll have a new identity-piece ready: ‘I’m-not-an-X-person’”.
I’ve now tried making a new identity-piece story that’ll help (feedback welcome if there’s a flaw to it that I missed). It goes something like—“I expect that when I learn something new I will suck at it, and that’s OK”.
I realize this could lead to me persisting in things I’m genuinely terrible at when I should instead put my energy on something different. So I have a safeguard mindset that goes “get feedback from people who won’t be scared to hurt you, and evaluate if you should be doing something else to achieve the goal.”