Struggle and striving is a sign of confusion, not virtue. We need to understand the human platform, and program it effectively, instead of using up our extremely limited concentration and willpower by constantly fighting with it.
Viewed in this way, there’s no need to “struggle”—you simply need to know what the hell you’re doing. That is, have an “inside view” of the relationship between the “near” and “far” brains.
Once you know what the hell you’re doing you’ve got to bother to go ahead and actually do it. That’s hardly trivial.
With all due respect to the effective methods you describe, I suggest that ‘struggle’ remains a relevant description. It is certianly true that struggle and striving are no virtues in themselves. Yet programming our brains and using them effectively are hard work.
With practice, we can take weaknesses in the human platform and train them such that we don’t need to exert our limited concentration and willpower to constantly prop up our thinking. This is the same as with any expert skill.
Struggle and strive till you need struggle no more. Then pick a slightly more difficult thinking skill that relies upon the first and struggle and strive some more.
If you insist on believing it’s hard work, you can certainly make it such. But notice that Eliezer’s account indicates that once he chose suitable representations, the changes were immediate, or at least very quick. And that’s my experience with these methods also.
The difficult part of change isn’t changing your beliefs—it’s determining which beliefs you have that aren’t useful to you… and that therefore need changing.
That’s the bit that’s incredibly difficult, unless you have the advantage of a successful model in a given area. (Not unlike the difference between applying a programming pattern, and inventing a programming pattern.)
For example, I’d say that the utility of a belief in struggle being a requirement for rationality is very low. Such a belief only seemed attractive to me in the past, because it was associated with an idea of being noble. Dropping it enabled me to make more useful changes, a lot faster.
On a more general level, when someone is successfully doing something that I consider a struggle, and that person says that doing the thing is easy, the rational response is for me to want to learn more about their mental models and belief structure, in order to update my own.
Not to argue (however indirectly) that struggle—like death—is a good thing because it’s part of the natural order!
(This is also ignoring the part where “struggle” itself is a confusion: in reality, there is never anything to “strive for” OR “struggle against”; these are only emotional labels we attach to the map, that don’t actually exist in the territory. In reality, there are no problems or enemies, only facts. Time-consuming tasks exist, but this does not make them a struggle.)
Once you know what the hell you’re doing you’ve got to bother to go ahead and actually do it. That’s hardly trivial.
With all due respect to the effective methods you describe, I suggest that ‘struggle’ remains a relevant description. It is certianly true that struggle and striving are no virtues in themselves. Yet programming our brains and using them effectively are hard work.
With practice, we can take weaknesses in the human platform and train them such that we don’t need to exert our limited concentration and willpower to constantly prop up our thinking. This is the same as with any expert skill.
Struggle and strive till you need struggle no more. Then pick a slightly more difficult thinking skill that relies upon the first and struggle and strive some more.
If you insist on believing it’s hard work, you can certainly make it such. But notice that Eliezer’s account indicates that once he chose suitable representations, the changes were immediate, or at least very quick. And that’s my experience with these methods also.
The difficult part of change isn’t changing your beliefs—it’s determining which beliefs you have that aren’t useful to you… and that therefore need changing.
That’s the bit that’s incredibly difficult, unless you have the advantage of a successful model in a given area. (Not unlike the difference between applying a programming pattern, and inventing a programming pattern.)
For example, I’d say that the utility of a belief in struggle being a requirement for rationality is very low. Such a belief only seemed attractive to me in the past, because it was associated with an idea of being noble. Dropping it enabled me to make more useful changes, a lot faster.
On a more general level, when someone is successfully doing something that I consider a struggle, and that person says that doing the thing is easy, the rational response is for me to want to learn more about their mental models and belief structure, in order to update my own.
Not to argue (however indirectly) that struggle—like death—is a good thing because it’s part of the natural order!
(This is also ignoring the part where “struggle” itself is a confusion: in reality, there is never anything to “strive for” OR “struggle against”; these are only emotional labels we attach to the map, that don’t actually exist in the territory. In reality, there are no problems or enemies, only facts. Time-consuming tasks exist, but this does not make them a struggle.)