Here is my take on your situation, having been in a similar one myself recently. YMMV
(tl;dr: if you know that you must do X, go do X. If not, take the pressure off yourself and spend some time making yourself stronger and reading whatever will excite you)
Either you have something to protect, or you do not. If you do, it is not a fact about your identity, about who you want to be, but some state of the world outside you which either must come to pass, or must not be allowed to come to pass.
If you do have something to protect (and if the epistemology on which that something rests is sound, and you have rationally examined all its assumptions), then that should give direction to your growth. Put all else to the side and figure out what you can do to best advance that something, who you will need to be to best advance it, and how you can become that person.
But perhaps you do not. There is no shame in not currently having something to protect. Do not claim to care about X so that you can congratulate yourself for caring about X. The test is this: If someone were to tell you now that X is well and truly taken care of, would you feel gladness and relief, or would you feel disappointment that no one got to see you slay the mighty X?
I claim that it is a basic fact that there are things in the world which need to be done. People suffer and die. The world is not yet the place it should be. This should move you, even if you have not yet discovered the front on which you must fight. One day, you may come across one, and you will want to do everything you can to advance it. Make yourself stronger now, in whatever way you can, and on that day you will be glad of it.
How do you make yourself stronger when you do not yet know the task you will face? Your designer, blind as it is, has encountered this challenge before, and given you a drive with which to meet it. This is nothing more or less than what curiosity, the burning itch to know, is for.
If your own curiosity is what drives you to learn, akrasia will be a feeble foe. If you have a task to achieve, naturally you should learn what seems as though it will help you achieve it. But as long as you have none, you must learn whatever will excite you. Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel.
Right now, your curiosity is not driving your learning. Thus, my recommendation (and it’s extreme, so I will repeat again, YMMV) is that you make your time, and your education, your own for a year or so. Find some way to support yourself at a minimal level through minimal expenditure of time, and then devote the rest of your time to unshackling your curiosity and allowing it to grow.
It sounds as though the flame of your curiosity has been guttering lately. So had mine. Examine yourself carefully, though, and you will find it. Would you like to learn to play go? Do you wonder why rainbows take the shape they do? Do you wish you knew better how life came to take the shape it has? Is there a book you thumbed through years and years ago, that excited you, but which something else distracted you from finishing?
(I should pause to add that of course you must distinguish between the solid fuel which will make your curiosity stronger, and feeble fuel which will make it flash brightly for a moment, but grow no more.)
If you would be strong, it is not simply your knowledge you must increase. The whole of your mental health may need attention (if this seems like an implied insult, perhaps saying that mine certainly did, and still does, will blunt it). If you are depressed, seek treatment. If you feel isolated, seek like-minded others whom you can see in real life. If your self-worth is lacking, well, every means of making yourself stronger will aid this, but there are means of self-improvement which will make you feel stronger sooner. I recommend the gym. Your body knows, on the level of basic chemistry, what it means for your health to improve, what it means when you can lift a greater weight, and this will feed directly into your emotional well-being. And hell, if you bring a book that interests you, you can do both at once, and keep yourself away from YouTube and Reddit for a couple hours. For me at least, this was win-win-win.
As you learn, you will become strong, and when you discover a task, you will have some chance of being able to advance it. That does not mean that you should not be looking now. Keep your eyes open. Look to see what others whom you respect are trying to do. Do not seek to signal virtue, or to claim a praise-worthy task; simply try to ensure that if there is something that really, absolutely needs doing, you will hear of it, and you will take action.
That’s a lot of excellent advice (or at least, I think so), but I’d steer clearer of the deep portentous tone and quasi-mystical air when giving advice. It’s hard to adopt Eliezer’s exhortatory style without looking a bit like a parody of him, and you have a pretty good style of your own most of the time.
Thank you. That’s probably good advice, but I’m uncertain of how to take it. My style has always naturally fluctuated with whomever I’ve been reading a lot of lately. In high school, I wrote like I wished I were Douglas Adams, and right now now I tend to write like I wish I were Eliezer (with perhaps a side-helping of Hofstadter). Is there anything especially egregious that I ought to edit in this comment?
Happens to all of us. It’s not stark enough for me to suggest redacting the comment, but you should be aware of when you make vague but authoritative-sounding statements like “Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel”. Anything that, when I read it out loud, sounds like the words of a preacher or a fortune cookie, I reevaluate to see if I can express it less mysteriously, or whether it’s a redundant restatement of a point already made elsewhere.
On second thought, I’m no more qualified than you to give advice on writing style...
Hmm. In this case what I meant by that was the factual claim “The more time you spend learning things simply because you want to know them, the more those things will suggest other things which you will also want to know. If you devote sufficient time to this, and free yourself of influences which confound your curiosity with other, more fear-based drives, this process becomes self-sustaining, and leads to strong personal growth.” I also considered using the image of an engine which, with each revolution, draws in the fuel it will need to push it through the next.
Do you mean to say that
my statement of that claim sacrifices clarity in order to sound deep
by phrasing it as “deep wisdom,” I’m obscuring the fact that it is a factual claim, and thus can, and maybe should, be disputed as such
or that pulling off that style simply requires more skill than I have yet developed?
(If I’m going to ask such things, I should, of course, add that Crocker’s rules apply for this discussion—I care more about being a better writer tomorrow than I do about feeling like a good writer today.)
Well, in this case, it’s pretty clear in context what the phrase means, and it certainly won’t stop others here from disagreeing with it if need be; it’s just that it comes across as an affectation, and not a sincere style. The third option, I’d guess.
Obscured in Eliezer’s writing style is the difficulty of writing in this way without coming across as full of oneself. He’s honed his craft to the point that he can write something like the Twelve Virtues without looking ridiculous or kitschy, but in a certain sense he makes it look too easy to use highly metaphorical and evocative language while making serious points. For example, let’s compare
Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel.
with a sentence from 12 Virtues like
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own.
The “flame of your curiosity” sentence flies like a lead balloon, in my humble aesthetic opinion; the metaphor is hackneyed, the sentence structure is halting and dull, and there’s no meter to the sentence when you read it out loud. The everyday form of most prose sentences just won’t do if you’re trying to sound the least bit lyrical; go all the way, or not at all.
By contrast, the “leaf in the wind” sentence has this quality: when you read it, you almost hear it out loud. It’s a novel metaphor, in a flowing sentence with one well-placed pause, and with an audible metrical structure. That’s the kind of form you want if you’re trying to trigger the Deep Wisdom circuits toward a good end.
All that being said, there are definitely worse places to practice on one’s prose style than Less Wrong.
Here is my take on your situation, having been in a similar one myself recently. YMMV
(tl;dr: if you know that you must do X, go do X. If not, take the pressure off yourself and spend some time making yourself stronger and reading whatever will excite you)
Either you have something to protect, or you do not. If you do, it is not a fact about your identity, about who you want to be, but some state of the world outside you which either must come to pass, or must not be allowed to come to pass.
If you do have something to protect (and if the epistemology on which that something rests is sound, and you have rationally examined all its assumptions), then that should give direction to your growth. Put all else to the side and figure out what you can do to best advance that something, who you will need to be to best advance it, and how you can become that person.
But perhaps you do not. There is no shame in not currently having something to protect. Do not claim to care about X so that you can congratulate yourself for caring about X. The test is this: If someone were to tell you now that X is well and truly taken care of, would you feel gladness and relief, or would you feel disappointment that no one got to see you slay the mighty X?
I claim that it is a basic fact that there are things in the world which need to be done. People suffer and die. The world is not yet the place it should be. This should move you, even if you have not yet discovered the front on which you must fight. One day, you may come across one, and you will want to do everything you can to advance it. Make yourself stronger now, in whatever way you can, and on that day you will be glad of it.
How do you make yourself stronger when you do not yet know the task you will face? Your designer, blind as it is, has encountered this challenge before, and given you a drive with which to meet it. This is nothing more or less than what curiosity, the burning itch to know, is for.
If your own curiosity is what drives you to learn, akrasia will be a feeble foe. If you have a task to achieve, naturally you should learn what seems as though it will help you achieve it. But as long as you have none, you must learn whatever will excite you. Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel.
Right now, your curiosity is not driving your learning. Thus, my recommendation (and it’s extreme, so I will repeat again, YMMV) is that you make your time, and your education, your own for a year or so. Find some way to support yourself at a minimal level through minimal expenditure of time, and then devote the rest of your time to unshackling your curiosity and allowing it to grow.
It sounds as though the flame of your curiosity has been guttering lately. So had mine. Examine yourself carefully, though, and you will find it. Would you like to learn to play go? Do you wonder why rainbows take the shape they do? Do you wish you knew better how life came to take the shape it has? Is there a book you thumbed through years and years ago, that excited you, but which something else distracted you from finishing?
(I should pause to add that of course you must distinguish between the solid fuel which will make your curiosity stronger, and feeble fuel which will make it flash brightly for a moment, but grow no more.)
If you would be strong, it is not simply your knowledge you must increase. The whole of your mental health may need attention (if this seems like an implied insult, perhaps saying that mine certainly did, and still does, will blunt it). If you are depressed, seek treatment. If you feel isolated, seek like-minded others whom you can see in real life. If your self-worth is lacking, well, every means of making yourself stronger will aid this, but there are means of self-improvement which will make you feel stronger sooner. I recommend the gym. Your body knows, on the level of basic chemistry, what it means for your health to improve, what it means when you can lift a greater weight, and this will feed directly into your emotional well-being. And hell, if you bring a book that interests you, you can do both at once, and keep yourself away from YouTube and Reddit for a couple hours. For me at least, this was win-win-win.
As you learn, you will become strong, and when you discover a task, you will have some chance of being able to advance it. That does not mean that you should not be looking now. Keep your eyes open. Look to see what others whom you respect are trying to do. Do not seek to signal virtue, or to claim a praise-worthy task; simply try to ensure that if there is something that really, absolutely needs doing, you will hear of it, and you will take action.
That’s a lot of excellent advice (or at least, I think so), but I’d steer clearer of the deep portentous tone and quasi-mystical air when giving advice. It’s hard to adopt Eliezer’s exhortatory style without looking a bit like a parody of him, and you have a pretty good style of your own most of the time.
Thank you. That’s probably good advice, but I’m uncertain of how to take it. My style has always naturally fluctuated with whomever I’ve been reading a lot of lately. In high school, I wrote like I wished I were Douglas Adams, and right now now I tend to write like I wish I were Eliezer (with perhaps a side-helping of Hofstadter). Is there anything especially egregious that I ought to edit in this comment?
Happens to all of us. It’s not stark enough for me to suggest redacting the comment, but you should be aware of when you make vague but authoritative-sounding statements like “Feed the flame of your curiosity, and it will grow brighter, hotter, and will demand more fuel”. Anything that, when I read it out loud, sounds like the words of a preacher or a fortune cookie, I reevaluate to see if I can express it less mysteriously, or whether it’s a redundant restatement of a point already made elsewhere.
On second thought, I’m no more qualified than you to give advice on writing style...
Hmm. In this case what I meant by that was the factual claim “The more time you spend learning things simply because you want to know them, the more those things will suggest other things which you will also want to know. If you devote sufficient time to this, and free yourself of influences which confound your curiosity with other, more fear-based drives, this process becomes self-sustaining, and leads to strong personal growth.” I also considered using the image of an engine which, with each revolution, draws in the fuel it will need to push it through the next.
Do you mean to say that
my statement of that claim sacrifices clarity in order to sound deep
by phrasing it as “deep wisdom,” I’m obscuring the fact that it is a factual claim, and thus can, and maybe should, be disputed as such
or that pulling off that style simply requires more skill than I have yet developed?
(If I’m going to ask such things, I should, of course, add that Crocker’s rules apply for this discussion—I care more about being a better writer tomorrow than I do about feeling like a good writer today.)
Well, in this case, it’s pretty clear in context what the phrase means, and it certainly won’t stop others here from disagreeing with it if need be; it’s just that it comes across as an affectation, and not a sincere style. The third option, I’d guess.
Obscured in Eliezer’s writing style is the difficulty of writing in this way without coming across as full of oneself. He’s honed his craft to the point that he can write something like the Twelve Virtues without looking ridiculous or kitschy, but in a certain sense he makes it look too easy to use highly metaphorical and evocative language while making serious points. For example, let’s compare
with a sentence from 12 Virtues like
The “flame of your curiosity” sentence flies like a lead balloon, in my humble aesthetic opinion; the metaphor is hackneyed, the sentence structure is halting and dull, and there’s no meter to the sentence when you read it out loud. The everyday form of most prose sentences just won’t do if you’re trying to sound the least bit lyrical; go all the way, or not at all.
By contrast, the “leaf in the wind” sentence has this quality: when you read it, you almost hear it out loud. It’s a novel metaphor, in a flowing sentence with one well-placed pause, and with an audible metrical structure. That’s the kind of form you want if you’re trying to trigger the Deep Wisdom circuits toward a good end.
All that being said, there are definitely worse places to practice on one’s prose style than Less Wrong.
EDIT: Improved the style, appropriately enough.