Totally can relate to this. I was dealing with depression long before LW, but improved rationality sure made my depression much more fun and exciting. Sarcastically, I could say that LW gave me the tools to be really good at self-criticism.
I can’t exactly give you any advice on this, as I’m still dealing with this myself and I honestly don’t really know what works or even what the goal exactly is. Just wanted to say that the feeling “this compromise ‘have some fun now’ crap shouldn’t be necessary if I really were rational!” is only too familiar.
It lead me to constantly question my own values and how much I was merely signalling (mostly to myself). Like, “if I procrastinate on $goal or if I don’t enjoy doing $maximally_effective_but_boring_activity, then I probably don’t really want $goal”, but that just leads into deeper madness. And even when I understand (from results, mostly, or comparisons to more effective people) that I must be doing something wrong, I break down until I can exactly identify what it is. So I self-optimize so that I can be better at self-optimizing, but I never get around to doing anything.
(That’s not to say that LW was overall a negative influence for me. Quite the opposite. It’s just that adding powerful cognitive tools to a not-too-sane mind has a lot of nasty side-effects.)
“if I procrastinate on $goal or if I don’t enjoy doing $maximallyeffectivebutboringactivity, then I probably don’t really want $goal”, but that just leads into deeper madness.
If I understood this correctly (as you procrastinating on something, and concluding that you don’t actually want it), then most people around here call that akrasia.
Which isn’t really something to go mad about. Basically, your brain is a stapled together hodgepodge of systems which barely work together well enough to have worked in the ancestral environment.
Nowadays, we know and can do much more stuff. But there’s no reason to expect that your built in neural circuitry can turn your desire to accomplish something into tangible action, especially when your actions are only in the long term, and non-viscerally, related to you accomplishing your goal.
It’s not just akrasia, or rather, the implication of strong akrasia really weirds me out.
The easiest mechanism to implement goals would not be vulnerable to akrasia. At best it would be used to conserve limited resources, but that’s clearly not the case here. In fact, some goals work just fine, while others fail. This is especially notable when the same activity can have very different levels of akrasia depending on why I’m doing it. Blaming this on hodge-podge circuitry seems false to me (in the general case).
So I look for other explanations, and signaling is a pretty good starting point. What I thought was a real goal was just a social facade, e.g. I don’t want to study, I just want to be seen as having a degree. (Strong evidence for this is that I enjoy reading books for some personal research when I hated literally the same books when I had to read them for class.)
Because of this, I’m generally not convinced that my ability to do stuff is broken (at least not as badly), but rather, that I’m mistaken about what I really want. But as Xixidu mentioned, when you start applying rationality to that, you end up changing your own values in the process and not always in a pretty way.
At least at my end, I’m pretty sure that part of my problem isn’t that signalling is causing me to override my real desires, it’s that there’s something about feeling that I have to signal leads to me not wanting to cooperate, even if the action is something that I would otherwise want to do, or at least not mind all that much.
Writing this has made the issue clearer for me than it’s been, but it’s not completely clear—I think there’s a combination of fear and anger involved, and it’s a goddam shame that my customers (a decent and friendly bunch) are activating stuff that got built up when I was a kid.
I don’t want to study, I just want to be seen as having a degree. (Strong evidence for this is that I enjoy reading books for some personal research when I hated literally the same books when I had to read them for class.)
Fair enough, I guess I misunderstood what you were saying.
But as Xixidu mentioned, when you start applying rationality to that, you end up changing your own values in the process and not always in a pretty way.
I guess its not guaranteed to turn out well, and when I was still working through my value-conflicts it wasn’t fun. In the end though, the clarity that I got from knowing a few of my actual goals and values feels pretty liberating. Knowing (some of) what I want makes it soooo much easier for me to figure out how to do things that will make me happy, and with less regret or second thoughts after I decide.
Totally can relate to this. I was dealing with depression long before LW, but improved rationality sure made my depression much more fun and exciting. Sarcastically, I could say that LW gave me the tools to be really good at self-criticism.
I can’t exactly give you any advice on this, as I’m still dealing with this myself and I honestly don’t really know what works or even what the goal exactly is. Just wanted to say that the feeling “this compromise ‘have some fun now’ crap shouldn’t be necessary if I really were rational!” is only too familiar.
It lead me to constantly question my own values and how much I was merely signalling (mostly to myself). Like, “if I procrastinate on $goal or if I don’t enjoy doing $maximally_effective_but_boring_activity, then I probably don’t really want $goal”, but that just leads into deeper madness. And even when I understand (from results, mostly, or comparisons to more effective people) that I must be doing something wrong, I break down until I can exactly identify what it is. So I self-optimize so that I can be better at self-optimizing, but I never get around to doing anything.
(That’s not to say that LW was overall a negative influence for me. Quite the opposite. It’s just that adding powerful cognitive tools to a not-too-sane mind has a lot of nasty side-effects.)
If I understood this correctly (as you procrastinating on something, and concluding that you don’t actually want it), then most people around here call that akrasia.
Which isn’t really something to go mad about. Basically, your brain is a stapled together hodgepodge of systems which barely work together well enough to have worked in the ancestral environment.
Nowadays, we know and can do much more stuff. But there’s no reason to expect that your built in neural circuitry can turn your desire to accomplish something into tangible action, especially when your actions are only in the long term, and non-viscerally, related to you accomplishing your goal.
It’s not just akrasia, or rather, the implication of strong akrasia really weirds me out.
The easiest mechanism to implement goals would not be vulnerable to akrasia. At best it would be used to conserve limited resources, but that’s clearly not the case here. In fact, some goals work just fine, while others fail. This is especially notable when the same activity can have very different levels of akrasia depending on why I’m doing it. Blaming this on hodge-podge circuitry seems false to me (in the general case).
So I look for other explanations, and signaling is a pretty good starting point. What I thought was a real goal was just a social facade, e.g. I don’t want to study, I just want to be seen as having a degree. (Strong evidence for this is that I enjoy reading books for some personal research when I hated literally the same books when I had to read them for class.)
Because of this, I’m generally not convinced that my ability to do stuff is broken (at least not as badly), but rather, that I’m mistaken about what I really want. But as Xixidu mentioned, when you start applying rationality to that, you end up changing your own values in the process and not always in a pretty way.
At least at my end, I’m pretty sure that part of my problem isn’t that signalling is causing me to override my real desires, it’s that there’s something about feeling that I have to signal leads to me not wanting to cooperate, even if the action is something that I would otherwise want to do, or at least not mind all that much.
Writing this has made the issue clearer for me than it’s been, but it’s not completely clear—I think there’s a combination of fear and anger involved, and it’s a goddam shame that my customers (a decent and friendly bunch) are activating stuff that got built up when I was a kid.
Fair enough, I guess I misunderstood what you were saying.
I guess its not guaranteed to turn out well, and when I was still working through my value-conflicts it wasn’t fun. In the end though, the clarity that I got from knowing a few of my actual goals and values feels pretty liberating. Knowing (some of) what I want makes it soooo much easier for me to figure out how to do things that will make me happy, and with less regret or second thoughts after I decide.