Thank you! Writing is not my strong suit, but I’m quite confident about the ideas. I’ve written a lot, so it’s alright if you don’t want to engage with all of it. No pressure!
I should explain the thing about suffering better: We don’t suffer from the state of the world, but from how we think about it. This is crucial. When people try to improve other peoples happiness, they talk about making changes to reality, but that’s the least effective way they could go about it. I believe this is even sufficient. That we can enjoy life as it is now, without making any changes to it, by simply adopting a better perspective on things.
For example, inequality is a part of life, likely an unavoidable one (The Pareto principle seems to apply in every society no matter its type). And even under inequality, people have been happy, so it’s not even an issue in itself. But now we’re teaching people in lower positions that they’re suffering from injustice, that they’re pitiful, that they’re victims, and we’re teaching everyone else that life could be a paradise, if only evil and immoral influences weren’t preventing it. But this is a sure way to make people unhappy with their existence. To make them imagine how much better things could be, and make comparisons between a naive ideal and reality. Comparison is the thief of joy, and most people are happy with their lot unless you teach them not to be. Teaching people about suffering doesn’t cause it per se, but if you make people look for suffering, they will find it. If you condition your perception to notice something unpleasant, you will see it everywhere. Training yourself to notice suffering may have side-effects. I have a bit of tinnitus, and I got over it by not paying it any attention. It’s only like this that my mind will start to filter it away, so that I can forget about it.
The marketing perspective
I don’t think you need pain to motivate people to change, the carrot is as good at the stick. But you need one of the two at minimum (curiousity and other such drives make you act naturally, but do so by making it uncomfortable not to act and rewarding to act) I don’t think that suffering is bearable because of reward itself, but because of perceived value and meaning. Birth is really painful, but the event is so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Same for people who compete in the olympics, they have found something meaningful enough that a bit of physical pain is a non-issue. You can teach this to people, but it’s hard to apply. It’s better to help them avoid the sort of nihilism which makes them question whether things are worth it. I think one of the causes of modern nihilism is a lack of aesthetics.
My 2nd perspective
I don’t think understanding translates directly into power. It’s a common problem to think “I know what I should be doing, but I can’t bring myself to do it”. If understanding something granted you power over it, I’d practically be a wizard by now. You can shift the problem that people attack, but if they have actual problems which put them in danger, I think their focus should remain on these. You can always create dissatisfaction by luring them towards better futures, in a way which benefits both them and others at the same time.
I’m never motivated by moral arguments, but some self-help books are alluring to me because they prey on my selfishness in a healthy manner which also demands responsibility and hard work.
As for the third possibility, that sounds a bit pessimistic. But I don’t think it would be a worthless outcome as long as the image of what could be isn’t a dangerous delusion. Other proposed roads to happiness include “Destroy your ego”, “Be content with nothing”, “Eat SSRIs forever”, and various self-help which asks you to “hustle” and overwork.
who want to prevent human extinction
I see! That something deeper than preventing suffering. I even think that there’s some conflicts between the two goals. But motivating people towards this should be easier since they’re preventing their own destruction as well, and not just helping other people.
it is difficult to know what the far-reaching consequences of this hypothetical world would be
It really is. But it’s interesting to me how both of us haven’t used this information to decrease our own suffering. It’s like I can’t value things if they come too easy, and like I want to find something which is worth my suffering. But we can agree that wasted suffering is a thing. That state of indecision, being unable to either die or live, yield or fight back, fix the cause of suffering or come to terms with it. The scarcity mindset is definitely a problem, but many resources are limited. I think a more complex problem would be that people tend to look for bad actions to avoid, rather than positive actions to adopt. It’s all “we need to stop doing X” and “Y is bad” and “Z is evil”. It’s all about reduction, restrictions, avoidance. It simply chokes us. Many good people trap themselves with excessive limitations and become unable to move freely. To simply use positives likes “You should be brave”, “You should stand up for what you believe in”, “You should accept people for who they are” would likely help improve this problem.
there are certain important aspects of human psychology that I’m still unsure about
I think pain and such are thresholds between competing things. If I’m tired and hungry, whether or not I will cook some food depends on which of the two cause the greatest discomfort. When procrastinating I’ve also found that deadlines helped me. Once I was backed into a corner and had to take action, I suddenly did. I ran away for as long as I could. The stress from deadlines might also result in dopamine and adrenaline, which help in the short term. ”Acceptance of suffering” is a bit ambigious. Accepting something usually reduces the suffering it causes, and accepting suffering lessens it too. But one can get too used to suffering, which makes them wait too long before they change anything, like the “This is fine” meme or the boiling frog that I mentioned earlier
Spread logical decisionmaking
Logic can defend against mistakes caused by logic, but we did not destroy ourselves in the past when we were less logical than now. I also don’t think that logic reduces suffering. Many philosophers have been unhappy, and many people with down syndrome are all smiles. Less intelligent people often have a sort of wisdom about them, often called “street smarts” when observed, but I think that the lack of knowledge leads them to make less map-territory errors. They’re nearer to reality because they have less knowledge which can mislead them.
I personally think that intellect past a certain level gives humans the ability to deliberately manipulate their suffering
I don’t think any human being is intelligent enough to do this (Buddha managed, but the method was crude, reducing not only suffering). What we can do, is manipulate our reward systems. But this leaves us feeling empty, as we cannot fake meaning. Religion basically tells us to live a good life according to a fixed structure, and while most people don’t like this lack of freedom, it probably leads to more happiness in the long run (for the same reason that neuroticism and conscientiousness are inversely correlated)
since human meaning is constructed by our psychological systems
Yes, the philosophical question of meaning, and the psychology of meaning are different. To solve meaninglessness by proving external meaning (this is impossible, but lets assume you could), is like curing depression by arguing that one should be happy. Meaning is basically investment, engagement, and involvement in something which feels like it has substance.
I recommend just considering humanity as a set of axioms. Like with mathematical axioms, this gives us a foundation. Like with mathematics, it doesn’t matter that this foundation is arbitrary, for no “absolute” foundation can exist (in other words, no set of axioms are more correct than any other. Objectivity does not exist, even in mathematics, everything is inherently relative). Since attemping to prove axioms is silly, considering human nature (or yourself) as sets of axioms allows you not to worry about meaning and values anymore. If you want humanity to survive, you no longer have to justify this preference.
Maybe you can point me to a source of information that will help me see your perspective on this?
That would be difficult as it’s my own conclusion. But do you know this quote by Taleb? ”I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.” The smaller the scope, the better. The reason stupid people are happier than smart people is because their scope of consideration is smaller. Being a big fish in a small pond feels good, but increase your scope of comparison to an entire country, and you become a nobody. Politics makes people miserable because the scope is too big, it’s feeding your brain with problems that you have no possibility of solving by yourself. “Community” is essential to human well-being because it’s cohersion on a local level. “family values” are important for the same reason. Theres more crime in bigger cities than smaller ones. Smaller communities have less crazy behaviour, they’re more down-to-earth. A lot of terrible things emerge when you increase the scale of things. Multiple things on a smaller scale does not seem to have a cost. One family can have great coherence. You can have 100 families living side by side, still great. But force them all to live together in one big house, and you will notice the cost of centralization. You will need hierarchies, coordination, and more rules. This is similar to urbanization. It’s also similar to how the internet went from being millions of websites, to becoming a few 100 popular websites. It’s even similar to companies merging into giants that most people consider evil. An important antidote is isolation (gatekeeping, borders, personal boundaries, independence, seperation of powers, the single-responsibility-principle, live and let live philosophies, privacy and other rights, preservation). I wish it was just “reduced efficiency” which was the problem. And sadly, it seems that they optimal way to increase the efficiency between many things is simply to force them towards similarity. For society, this means the destruction of different cultures, the destruction of different ways of thinking, the destruction of different moralities and different social norms.
I presume you’re referring to management claiming credit
It’s much more abstract than that. The amount of countries, brands, languages, accents, standards, websites, communities, religious, animals, etc. are all decreasing in numbers. All slowly tending towards 1 thing having monopoly, with this 1 thing being the average of what was merged.
Don’t worry if you don’t get last few points. I’ve tried to explain them before, but I have yet to be understood.
I wonder about what basis/set of information you’re using to make these 3 claims?
Once a moloch problem has been started, you “either join or die”, like you said. But we can prevent moloch problems from occuring in the first place, by preventing the world from becoming legible enough. For this idea, I was inspired by “Seeing like a state” and this
There’s many prisoners-dilemma like situations in society, which do not cause problems simply because people don’t have enough information to see them. If enough people cannot see them, then the games are only played by a few people. But that’s the only solution to Moloch: Collectively agree not to play (or, I suppose, never stop playing in the first place). The amount of moloch-like problems has increased as a side-effect of the increased accessibility of information. Dating apps ruined dating by making it more legible. As information became more visible, and people had more choices and could make more informed decisions, they became less happy. The hidden information in traditional dating made it more “human”, and less materialistic as well. Since rationalists, academics and intellectuals in general want to increase the openness of information and seem rather naive about the consequences, I don’t want to become either.
I agree with the factors leading to human extinction. My solution is “go back”. This may not be possible, and like you say, we need to use intelligence and technology to go forwards instead. But like the alignment problem, this is rather difficult. I haven’t even taught myself high-level mathematics, I’ve noticed all this through intuition alone. I think letting small disasters happen naturally could help us prevent black-swan like events. Just like burning small patches of trees can prevent large forest fires. Humanity is doing the opposite. By putting all its eggs in one basket and making things “too big to fail”, we make sure that once a disaster happens, it hits hard.
Related to all of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ (the page mentions black swan risks, Taleb, Ribbonfarms, legibility and centralization). I actually had most of these thought before I knew about this page, so that gives me some confidence that I’m not just connecting unrelated concepts like a schizophrenic.
My argumentation is a little messy, but I don’t want to invest my life in understanding this issue or anything. Kaczynski’s books have a few overlapping arguments with me, and the other books I know are even more crazy, so I can’t recommend them.
But maybe I’m just worrying over nothing. I’m extrapolating things as linear or exponential, but they may be s-shaped or self-correcting cycles. And any partial collapse of society will probably go back to normal or even bring improvements with it in the long run. A lot of people have ruined themselves worrying over things which turned out just fine in the end.
Thank you! Writing is not my strong suit, but I’m quite confident about the ideas. I’ve written a lot, so it’s alright if you don’t want to engage with all of it. No pressure!
I should explain the thing about suffering better:
We don’t suffer from the state of the world, but from how we think about it. This is crucial. When people try to improve other peoples happiness, they talk about making changes to reality, but that’s the least effective way they could go about it.
I believe this is even sufficient. That we can enjoy life as it is now, without making any changes to it, by simply adopting a better perspective on things.
For example, inequality is a part of life, likely an unavoidable one (The Pareto principle seems to apply in every society no matter its type). And even under inequality, people have been happy, so it’s not even an issue in itself. But now we’re teaching people in lower positions that they’re suffering from injustice, that they’re pitiful, that they’re victims, and we’re teaching everyone else that life could be a paradise, if only evil and immoral influences weren’t preventing it. But this is a sure way to make people unhappy with their existence. To make them imagine how much better things could be, and make comparisons between a naive ideal and reality. Comparison is the thief of joy, and most people are happy with their lot unless you teach them not to be.
Teaching people about suffering doesn’t cause it per se, but if you make people look for suffering, they will find it. If you condition your perception to notice something unpleasant, you will see it everywhere. Training yourself to notice suffering may have side-effects. I have a bit of tinnitus, and I got over it by not paying it any attention. It’s only like this that my mind will start to filter it away, so that I can forget about it.
I don’t think you need pain to motivate people to change, the carrot is as good at the stick. But you need one of the two at minimum (curiousity and other such drives make you act naturally, but do so by making it uncomfortable not to act and rewarding to act)
I don’t think that suffering is bearable because of reward itself, but because of perceived value and meaning. Birth is really painful, but the event is so meaningful that the pain becomes secondary. Same for people who compete in the olympics, they have found something meaningful enough that a bit of physical pain is a non-issue.
You can teach this to people, but it’s hard to apply. It’s better to help them avoid the sort of nihilism which makes them question whether things are worth it. I think one of the causes of modern nihilism is a lack of aesthetics.
I don’t think understanding translates directly into power. It’s a common problem to think “I know what I should be doing, but I can’t bring myself to do it”. If understanding something granted you power over it, I’d practically be a wizard by now.
You can shift the problem that people attack, but if they have actual problems which put them in danger, I think their focus should remain on these. You can always create dissatisfaction by luring them towards better futures, in a way which benefits both them and others at the same time.
I’m never motivated by moral arguments, but some self-help books are alluring to me because they prey on my selfishness in a healthy manner which also demands responsibility and hard work.
As for the third possibility, that sounds a bit pessimistic. But I don’t think it would be a worthless outcome as long as the image of what could be isn’t a dangerous delusion. Other proposed roads to happiness include “Destroy your ego”, “Be content with nothing”, “Eat SSRIs forever”, and various self-help which asks you to “hustle” and overwork.
I see! That something deeper than preventing suffering. I even think that there’s some conflicts between the two goals. But motivating people towards this should be easier since they’re preventing their own destruction as well, and not just helping other people.
It really is. But it’s interesting to me how both of us haven’t used this information to decrease our own suffering. It’s like I can’t value things if they come too easy, and like I want to find something which is worth my suffering.
But we can agree that wasted suffering is a thing. That state of indecision, being unable to either die or live, yield or fight back, fix the cause of suffering or come to terms with it.
The scarcity mindset is definitely a problem, but many resources are limited. I think a more complex problem would be that people tend to look for bad actions to avoid, rather than positive actions to adopt. It’s all “we need to stop doing X” and “Y is bad” and “Z is evil”. It’s all about reduction, restrictions, avoidance. It simply chokes us. Many good people trap themselves with excessive limitations and become unable to move freely. To simply use positives likes “You should be brave”, “You should stand up for what you believe in”, “You should accept people for who they are” would likely help improve this problem.
I think pain and such are thresholds between competing things. If I’m tired and hungry, whether or not I will cook some food depends on which of the two cause the greatest discomfort.
When procrastinating I’ve also found that deadlines helped me. Once I was backed into a corner and had to take action, I suddenly did. I ran away for as long as I could. The stress from deadlines might also result in dopamine and adrenaline, which help in the short term.
”Acceptance of suffering” is a bit ambigious. Accepting something usually reduces the suffering it causes, and accepting suffering lessens it too. But one can get too used to suffering, which makes them wait too long before they change anything, like the “This is fine” meme or the boiling frog that I mentioned earlier
Logic can defend against mistakes caused by logic, but we did not destroy ourselves in the past when we were less logical than now. I also don’t think that logic reduces suffering. Many philosophers have been unhappy, and many people with down syndrome are all smiles. Less intelligent people often have a sort of wisdom about them, often called “street smarts” when observed, but I think that the lack of knowledge leads them to make less map-territory errors. They’re nearer to reality because they have less knowledge which can mislead them.
I don’t think any human being is intelligent enough to do this (Buddha managed, but the method was crude, reducing not only suffering). What we can do, is manipulate our reward systems. But this leaves us feeling empty, as we cannot fake meaning. Religion basically tells us to live a good life according to a fixed structure, and while most people don’t like this lack of freedom, it probably leads to more happiness in the long run (for the same reason that neuroticism and conscientiousness are inversely correlated)
Yes, the philosophical question of meaning, and the psychology of meaning are different. To solve meaninglessness by proving external meaning (this is impossible, but lets assume you could), is like curing depression by arguing that one should be happy. Meaning is basically investment, engagement, and involvement in something which feels like it has substance.
I recommend just considering humanity as a set of axioms. Like with mathematical axioms, this gives us a foundation. Like with mathematics, it doesn’t matter that this foundation is arbitrary, for no “absolute” foundation can exist (in other words, no set of axioms are more correct than any other. Objectivity does not exist, even in mathematics, everything is inherently relative).
Since attemping to prove axioms is silly, considering human nature (or yourself) as sets of axioms allows you not to worry about meaning and values anymore. If you want humanity to survive, you no longer have to justify this preference.
That would be difficult as it’s my own conclusion. But do you know this quote by Taleb?
”I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”
The smaller the scope, the better. The reason stupid people are happier than smart people is because their scope of consideration is smaller. Being a big fish in a small pond feels good, but increase your scope of comparison to an entire country, and you become a nobody. Politics makes people miserable because the scope is too big, it’s feeding your brain with problems that you have no possibility of solving by yourself. “Community” is essential to human well-being because it’s cohersion on a local level. “family values” are important for the same reason. Theres more crime in bigger cities than smaller ones. Smaller communities have less crazy behaviour, they’re more down-to-earth. A lot of terrible things emerge when you increase the scale of things.
Multiple things on a smaller scale does not seem to have a cost. One family can have great coherence. You can have 100 families living side by side, still great. But force them all to live together in one big house, and you will notice the cost of centralization. You will need hierarchies, coordination, and more rules. This is similar to urbanization. It’s also similar to how the internet went from being millions of websites, to becoming a few 100 popular websites. It’s even similar to companies merging into giants that most people consider evil.
An important antidote is isolation (gatekeeping, borders, personal boundaries, independence, seperation of powers, the single-responsibility-principle, live and let live philosophies, privacy and other rights, preservation).
I wish it was just “reduced efficiency” which was the problem. And sadly, it seems that they optimal way to increase the efficiency between many things is simply to force them towards similarity. For society, this means the destruction of different cultures, the destruction of different ways of thinking, the destruction of different moralities and different social norms.
It’s much more abstract than that. The amount of countries, brands, languages, accents, standards, websites, communities, religious, animals, etc. are all decreasing in numbers. All slowly tending towards 1 thing having monopoly, with this 1 thing being the average of what was merged.
Don’t worry if you don’t get last few points. I’ve tried to explain them before, but I have yet to be understood.
Once a moloch problem has been started, you “either join or die”, like you said. But we can prevent moloch problems from occuring in the first place, by preventing the world from becoming legible enough. For this idea, I was inspired by “Seeing like a state” and this
There’s many prisoners-dilemma like situations in society, which do not cause problems simply because people don’t have enough information to see them. If enough people cannot see them, then the games are only played by a few people. But that’s the only solution to Moloch: Collectively agree not to play (or, I suppose, never stop playing in the first place). The amount of moloch-like problems has increased as a side-effect of the increased accessibility of information. Dating apps ruined dating by making it more legible. As information became more visible, and people had more choices and could make more informed decisions, they became less happy. The hidden information in traditional dating made it more “human”, and less materialistic as well. Since rationalists, academics and intellectuals in general want to increase the openness of information and seem rather naive about the consequences, I don’t want to become either.
I agree with the factors leading to human extinction. My solution is “go back”. This may not be possible, and like you say, we need to use intelligence and technology to go forwards instead. But like the alignment problem, this is rather difficult. I haven’t even taught myself high-level mathematics, I’ve noticed all this through intuition alone.
I think letting small disasters happen naturally could help us prevent black-swan like events. Just like burning small patches of trees can prevent large forest fires. Humanity is doing the opposite. By putting all its eggs in one basket and making things “too big to fail”, we make sure that once a disaster happens, it hits hard.
Related to all of this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ (the page mentions black swan risks, Taleb, Ribbonfarms, legibility and centralization). I actually had most of these thought before I knew about this page, so that gives me some confidence that I’m not just connecting unrelated concepts like a schizophrenic.
My argumentation is a little messy, but I don’t want to invest my life in understanding this issue or anything. Kaczynski’s books have a few overlapping arguments with me, and the other books I know are even more crazy, so I can’t recommend them.
But maybe I’m just worrying over nothing. I’m extrapolating things as linear or exponential, but they may be s-shaped or self-correcting cycles. And any partial collapse of society will probably go back to normal or even bring improvements with it in the long run. A lot of people have ruined themselves worrying over things which turned out just fine in the end.