I think the original mythology of the rationality community is based around cheat codes
A lot of the original mythology, in the sense of the things Eliezer wrote about in the sequences, is about avoiding self-deception. I continue to think this is very important but think the writing in the Sequences doesn’t do a good job of teaching it.
The main issue I see with the cheat code / munchkin philosophy as it actually played out on LW is that it involved a lot of stuff I would describe as tricking yourself or the rider fighting against / overriding the elephant, e.g. strategies like attempting to reward yourself for the behavior you “want” in order to fix your “akrasia.” Nothing along these lines, e.g. Beeminder, worked for me when I experimented with them, and the whole time my actual bottleneck was that I was very sad and very lonely and distracting myself from and numbing that (which accounted for a huge portion of my “akrasia,” the rest was poor health, sleep and nutrition in particular).
As a counter to this, I got very very far with this sort of self-improvement for a very long time (though I think LW was very bad at teaching it, and I mostly got it from other sources.) I’ve recently focused on the alignment based models as I was starting to get to the point of diminishing returns with the other way, but I did get a lot out of the previous paradigm
I think the alignment based models are very very powerful, and I also think that the overriding the elephant models are quite powerful and get too much of a bad rap.
Not mr-hire, but I got a lot of value from things more in the space of “improve your ability to control the elephant.” I expect the lowest hanging fruit will vary from person to person, and part of the point of this post was to alert people to the fact that there are different strategies that they might not be considering (either for themselves or people they’re giving advice to)
I think there was a general skill of “learn how to focus on a task”, which I learned by combination of:
– finding projects that I cared enough about to actually want to focus on them (importantly, this was not sufficient to keep me going through the less shiny parts after the honeymoon period and in some cases even during the honeymoon period)
– getting SelfControl.app, which wouldn’t have worked on it’s own if I’d just been forcing myself to use it
– establishing persistent habits and meta-habits to stay focused and to build incentive loops for myself.
Once I gained the relevant skills, they remained applicable even in areas that were less viscerally exciting.
Most of the lack-of-system-1-yumminess I fixed by changing my environment rather than changing myself.
This makes sense, but I also want to register that I viscerally dislike “controlling the elephant” as a frame, in roughly the same way as I viscerally dislike “controlling children” as a frame.
Just pointing out that I very much agree with this, mostly because I can relate to it. It really seems as though LW is written for people who are seeking to improve their lives without actually having mental health or similar issues that mean they’d need the improvement. Which doesn’t necessarily mean LW is actually written by such people. We’re very open about the mental health issues some here actually have, but we’re fixing them the way we would do regular self-improvement. LW does seem to do self-improvement quite well, though, although, being an online forum, it’s not that good at providing the practice that is always most of what it takes to improve.
A lot of the original mythology, in the sense of the things Eliezer wrote about in the sequences, is about avoiding self-deception. I continue to think this is very important but think the writing in the Sequences doesn’t do a good job of teaching it.
The main issue I see with the cheat code / munchkin philosophy as it actually played out on LW is that it involved a lot of stuff I would describe as tricking yourself or the rider fighting against / overriding the elephant, e.g. strategies like attempting to reward yourself for the behavior you “want” in order to fix your “akrasia.” Nothing along these lines, e.g. Beeminder, worked for me when I experimented with them, and the whole time my actual bottleneck was that I was very sad and very lonely and distracting myself from and numbing that (which accounted for a huge portion of my “akrasia,” the rest was poor health, sleep and nutrition in particular).
As a counter to this, I got very very far with this sort of self-improvement for a very long time (though I think LW was very bad at teaching it, and I mostly got it from other sources.) I’ve recently focused on the alignment based models as I was starting to get to the point of diminishing returns with the other way, but I did get a lot out of the previous paradigm
I think the alignment based models are very very powerful, and I also think that the overriding the elephant models are quite powerful and get too much of a bad rap.
Huh. Can you go into more detail about what you’ve done and how it’s helped you? Real curious.
Not mr-hire, but I got a lot of value from things more in the space of “improve your ability to control the elephant.” I expect the lowest hanging fruit will vary from person to person, and part of the point of this post was to alert people to the fact that there are different strategies that they might not be considering (either for themselves or people they’re giving advice to)
I think there was a general skill of “learn how to focus on a task”, which I learned by combination of:
– finding projects that I cared enough about to actually want to focus on them (importantly, this was not sufficient to keep me going through the less shiny parts after the honeymoon period and in some cases even during the honeymoon period)
– getting SelfControl.app, which wouldn’t have worked on it’s own if I’d just been forcing myself to use it
– establishing persistent habits and meta-habits to stay focused and to build incentive loops for myself.
Once I gained the relevant skills, they remained applicable even in areas that were less viscerally exciting.
Most of the lack-of-system-1-yumminess I fixed by changing my environment rather than changing myself.
This makes sense, but I also want to register that I viscerally dislike “controlling the elephant” as a frame, in roughly the same way as I viscerally dislike “controlling children” as a frame.
Just pointing out that I very much agree with this, mostly because I can relate to it. It really seems as though LW is written for people who are seeking to improve their lives without actually having mental health or similar issues that mean they’d need the improvement. Which doesn’t necessarily mean LW is actually written by such people. We’re very open about the mental health issues some here actually have, but we’re fixing them the way we would do regular self-improvement. LW does seem to do self-improvement quite well, though, although, being an online forum, it’s not that good at providing the practice that is always most of what it takes to improve.