Julia Galef: Another one of your posts that has stayed with me is a post in which you were responding to someone’s question—I think the question was, “What are your favorite virtues?” And you described three. They were compassion for yourself; creating conditions where you’ll learn the truth; and sovereignty. [...] Can you explain briefly what sovereignty means?
Kelsey Piper: Yeah, so I characterize sovereignty as the virtue of believing yourself qualified to reason about your life, and to reason about the world, and to act based on your understanding of it.
I think it is surprisingly common to feel fundamentally unqualified even to reason about what you like, what makes you happy, which of several activities in front of you you want to do, which of your priorities are really important to you.
I think a lot of people feel the need to answer those questions by asking society what the objectively correct answer is, or trying to understand which answer won’t get them in trouble. And so I think it’s just really important to learn to answer those questions with what you actually want and what you actually care about. [...]
Julia Galef: One insight that I had from reading your post in particular was that maybe a lot of debates over whether you should “trust your gut” are actually about sovereignty. [...]
Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I definitely think—maybe replace “trust your gut” with --
Julia Galef: Consult?
Kelsey Piper: Yeah, check in with your gut. Treat your gut as some information.
Julia Galef: Yeah.
Kelsey Piper: And treat making your gut more informative as an important part of your growth as a person. [...] I’ve stewed over lots of hard questions. And I got a sense of when I’ve tended to be right, and when I tended to be wrong, and that informs my gut and the extent to which I feel able to trust it now.
Spencer Mulesky: Why is this good content? Im not getting it.
Rob Bensinger: That seems hard to summarize!
The “trust your gut” portion maybe obscures the thing I think is important, because it seems more banal and specific. The important thing I think is being pointed at with “sovereignty” is more general than just “notice how you feel about things, and hone your intuitions through experience”, though that’s certainly a core thing people need to do.
One way of pointing at the more basic thing I have in mind is: by default, humans are pretty bad at being honest with themselves and others; are pretty bad at thinking clearly; are pretty bad at expressing and resolving disagreements, as opposed to conformity/mimicry or unproductive brawls; are pretty bad at taking risks and trying new things; are pretty bad at attending to argument structure, as opposed to status/authority/respectability.
We can build habits and group norms that make it a lot easier to avoid those problems, and to catch ourselves when we slip up. But this generally requires that people see past abstractions like “what I should do” and “what’s normal to do” and “what’s correct to do” and be able to observe and articulate what concrete things are going on in their head. A common thing that blocks this is that people feel like there’s something silly or illegitimate or un-objective about reporting what’s really going on inside their heads, so they feel a need to grasp at fake reasons that sound more normal/objective/impartial. Giving EAs/rationalists/etc. more social credit for something like “sovereignty”, and giving them language for articulating this ideal, is one way of trying to fight back against this epistemically and instrumentally bad set of norms and mental habits.
Spencer Mulesky: Thanks!
Rob Bensinger: It might also help to give some random examples (with interesting interconnections) where I’ve found this helpful.
‘I’m in a longstanding relationship that’s turned sour. But I feel like I can’t just leave (or make other changes to my life) because I’m not having enough fun / my life isn’t satisfying as many values as I’d like; I feel like I need to find something objectively Bad my partner has done, so that I can feel Justified and Legitimate in leaving.’ People often feel like they’re not “allowed” to take radical action to improve their lives, because of others’ seeming claims on their life.
A lot of the distinct issues raised on https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10160749026995447, like Jessica Taylor’s worry about using moral debt as a social lever to push people around. In my experience, this is not so dissimilar from the relationship case above; people think about their obligations in fuzzy ways that make it hard to see what they actually want and easy to get trapped by others’ claims on their output.
People feel like they’re being looked down on or shamed or insufficiently socially rewarded/incentivized/respected for things about how they’re trying to do EA. Examples might include ‘starting risky projects’, ‘applying to EA jobs’, ‘applying to non-EA jobs’, ‘earning to give’, ‘not earning to give’, ‘producing ideas that aren’t perfectly vetted or write-ups that aren’t perfectly polished’. (See e.g. the comments on https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10161249846505447; or for the latter point, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7YG9zknYE8di9PuFg/epistemic-tenure and a bunch of other recent writings share a theme of ‘highly productive intellectuals are feeling pressure to not say things publicly until they’re super super confident of them’).
It seems to me like guilt and shame function surprisingly poorly as motivators for good work in the modern world. Not only do they often not result in people getting things done at the time, they can create a positive feedback loop that makes people depressed and unproductive for months.
But then why have we evolved to feel them so strongly?
One possibility is that guilt and shame do work well, but their function is to stop us from doing bad things. In a world where there’s only a few things you can do, it’s clear how to do them all, and the priority is to stay away from a few especially bad options, that’s helpful.
But to do good skilled work, it’s not enough to know what you shouldn’t do — e.g. procrastinate. The main problem is figuring out what out of the million things you might do is the right one, and staying focussed on it. And for that curiosity or excitement or pride are much more effective. You need to be pulled in the right direction, not merely pushed away from doing nothing, or severely violating a social norm.
Another second variation on the same theme would be that modern work is different from the tasks our hunter gatherer ancestors did in all sorts of ways that can make it less motivating. In the past just feeling guilt about e.g. being lazy, was enough to get us to go gather some berries, but now for most of us, it isn’t. So guilt fails, and then we feel even more guilty, and then we’re even less energetic, so it fails again, etc.
A third possibility is that shame and guilt are primarily about motivating you to fit into a group and go along with its peculiar norms. But in a modern workplace that’s not the main thing most of us are lacking. Rather we need to be inspired by something we’re working on and give it enough focussed attention long enough to produce an interesting product.
Any other theories? Or maybe you think guilt and shame do work well?
From an April 2019 Facebook discussion:
Rob Bensinger:
Source: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-230-kelsey-piper-on-big-picture-journalism-covering-the-t.html
Based on https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/177842591031/what-are-your-favorite-virtues
Spencer Mulesky: Why is this good content? Im not getting it.
Rob Bensinger: That seems hard to summarize!
The “trust your gut” portion maybe obscures the thing I think is important, because it seems more banal and specific. The important thing I think is being pointed at with “sovereignty” is more general than just “notice how you feel about things, and hone your intuitions through experience”, though that’s certainly a core thing people need to do.
One way of pointing at the more basic thing I have in mind is: by default, humans are pretty bad at being honest with themselves and others; are pretty bad at thinking clearly; are pretty bad at expressing and resolving disagreements, as opposed to conformity/mimicry or unproductive brawls; are pretty bad at taking risks and trying new things; are pretty bad at attending to argument structure, as opposed to status/authority/respectability.
We can build habits and group norms that make it a lot easier to avoid those problems, and to catch ourselves when we slip up. But this generally requires that people see past abstractions like “what I should do” and “what’s normal to do” and “what’s correct to do” and be able to observe and articulate what concrete things are going on in their head. A common thing that blocks this is that people feel like there’s something silly or illegitimate or un-objective about reporting what’s really going on inside their heads, so they feel a need to grasp at fake reasons that sound more normal/objective/impartial. Giving EAs/rationalists/etc. more social credit for something like “sovereignty”, and giving them language for articulating this ideal, is one way of trying to fight back against this epistemically and instrumentally bad set of norms and mental habits.
Spencer Mulesky: Thanks!
Rob Bensinger: It might also help to give some random examples (with interesting interconnections) where I’ve found this helpful.
‘I’m in a longstanding relationship that’s turned sour. But I feel like I can’t just leave (or make other changes to my life) because I’m not having enough fun / my life isn’t satisfying as many values as I’d like; I feel like I need to find something objectively Bad my partner has done, so that I can feel Justified and Legitimate in leaving.’ People often feel like they’re not “allowed” to take radical action to improve their lives, because of others’ seeming claims on their life.
A lot of the distinct issues raised on https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10160749026995447, like Jessica Taylor’s worry about using moral debt as a social lever to push people around. In my experience, this is not so dissimilar from the relationship case above; people think about their obligations in fuzzy ways that make it hard to see what they actually want and easy to get trapped by others’ claims on their output.
People feel like they’re being looked down on or shamed or insufficiently socially rewarded/incentivized/respected for things about how they’re trying to do EA. Examples might include ‘starting risky projects’, ‘applying to EA jobs’, ‘applying to non-EA jobs’, ‘earning to give’, ‘not earning to give’, ‘producing ideas that aren’t perfectly vetted or write-ups that aren’t perfectly polished’. (See e.g. the comments on https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10161249846505447; or for the latter point, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7YG9zknYE8di9PuFg/epistemic-tenure and a bunch of other recent writings share a theme of ‘highly productive intellectuals are feeling pressure to not say things publicly until they’re super super confident of them’).
People feel like they can’t (even in private conversation) acknowledge social status and esteem (https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10160475363630447), respectability, or ‘Ra’-type things (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra), or how those phenomena affects everyone’s preferences or judgments.
Modest epistemology in Inadequate Equilibria (https://equilibriabook.com/toc/)
A lot of CFAR-style personal debugging I’ve done has depended on my ability to catch myself in the mental motion of punishing myself (or disregarding myself, etc.) on the timescale of ‘less than a second’. And then stopping to change that response or analyze why that’s happening, so I can drill down better on underlying dispositions I want to improve. Cf. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Ugh_field and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5dhWhjfxn4tPfFQdi/physical-and-mental-behavior.
Rob Wiblin, August 2019:
Cf. Brienne Yudkowsky on shame and the discussion on https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10160749026995447.