Just because there is somebody who is smarter than you, who works on some specific topic, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work on it. You should work on the thing where you can make the largest positive difference. [...]
I think you address an important point. Especially for people who are attracted to LessWrong, there tends to be a lot identification with one’s cognitive abilities.
Realizing that there are other people who just are significantly more capable can be emotionally difficult.
For me, one important realization was that my original emotions around this kind of assumed a competition where not-winning was actually negative. When I grokked that a huge fraction of these super capable people are actually trying to do good things, this helped me shift towards mostly being glad if I encounter such people.
Despite a little tear on the ego, it has some advantages not to be the smartest in the room. Having read here on LW a couple of years ago and now bit by bit picking up some of the stuff that happened back then and in the meantime, the dominant feeling for me isn‘t envy of the capability of others, but relief that there are enough minds in the world entertaining thoughts that at least partially reflect my own shallow ones on topics that I deem important, but have no one to talk about.
Unless it involves some mathematics that I am not accustomed to, it feels as if I can follow and understand the majority of thoughts shared on this platform. That provides me with enough encouragment to delve deeper into the topics I am interested in, maybe even enough to work more actively on myself. In any case, it is more than I could hope for hanging out with the guys in the village, where most talk is about cars and gossip.
Yet, when asking myself what I possibly could contribute, the only things that I can come up with are sharing highly subjective experiences of my mind falling apart during manic psychoses, stitching myself together in the aftermath, and making a decent living job-wise and in terms of family life in spite of receiving very pessimistic prognoses for my future when I was in the process of rehabilitation.
I wish I could give more, but I had been spending much of my time playing video games and hanging out with people for senseless fun during my youth. Now, regardless of the degrees I‘ve received, I feel much less educated and capable than I could be.
No one is responsible for his genetic predispositions or his upbringing, but one is responsible for how one acts relating to the values one holds. I fell short on focused self-actualization, so maybe I‘m now the dumbest among the smart.
Now, what is the advantage that I have been talking about? I can probably learn from most of you in a mostly passive consuming style, whithout being obliged (by my morals) to contribute more than this mostly anecdotical comment.
Regarding the issue of hard-coded algorithms determining one‘s cognitive abilities: I‘m not sure about the malleability of deep cognitive processes in general, but I find myself to have undergone significant changes in meta-cognitive abilities as a result of recovery from psychosis. It has the character of some pre-conscious feeling about different trains of subconscious processes, involving both emotions and thoughts. Sometimes it extends to over-reflection that loses hold on some concrete issue and becomes circular, sometimes it helps to steer thinking and general behaviour into a desired direction. I can not remember having said impressions before falling ill and recovering. Thinking about these abilities gives me the impression that highly automated and reinforced sub-conscious routines might not be easily changeable to the more effective or efficient by themselves, but they might be integrated into some higher-order routines, changing their eventual output. These could be more and more automated themselves, thereby achieving an increase in fluid intelligence.
Thinking about these abilities gives me the impression that highly automated and reinforced sub-conscious routines might not be easily changeable to the more effective or efficient by themselves, but they might be integrated into some higher-order routines, changing their eventual output. These could be more and more automated themselves, thereby achieving an increase in fluid intelligence.
I definitely think that one can become better at understanding and steering the world, by improving their cognitive algorithms. I am just saying that there are some low-level ones that can’t be changed. So improvement needs to happen at a higher level. This then puts some hard limits on how much smarter you can get, and how much effort it takes to gain one unit of smartness.
On the point that you are not sure what you could even do, I just want to say: Did you try? It seems like the most common failure case is to not even try. Another common failure mode to avoid would be to have the wrong expectations about how hard something is, and then give up, because it is so much harder than expected. The hardness is I guess some indication of intelligence. Some people will find doing math just much easier than others, just because they are smarter.
But if you are trying to do something very hard, it might make sense to consider how somebody smart would feel doing this. Would they also struggle and find it difficult, because the problem before you is just intrinsically difficult? I think if you don’t think this thought explicitly, the default implicit assumption is always that what you are doing is easy for everybody else who does it. “Writing a book is a struggle”, is what I heard a professional author once say. Authors are authors, not necessarily because writing is a cakewalk for them. I would think more often than not, it is because they have managed to tune their expectations to reality, such that they no longer feel bad for taking the actually required time for completing whatever task they are working on.
I found what you said about the pre-conscious feeling interesting. It made me slightly improve my model about how to avoid procrastination and depression. Normally I only procrastinate when I feel pretty down (at least the kind of “hardcore” procrastination where you do something that definitely is not productive at all, such as watching a movie or playing a videogame). The problem is that once I am in the state of feeling down it is hard to execute a strategy that actually will make me feel better. For example, doing regular sports and meditation seems to help enormously with changing my general mood for the better. But once I feel really down these things are really hard to do. So what you need to do is develop the habit of carefully paying attention to your experience and notice when you are on a downward spiral, before you have fallen so low that interventions become difficult to implement. And then of cause you still need to actually implement the intervention, but becoming sensitive to subtle emotional trends (which I am still not as good at as I would like) seems to be >25% of the battle.
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago.
Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering.
Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
You writing this message reflecting on if writing this message is procrastination is probably an indicator for that it is, at least not the worst form of procrastination, which would be about entering a mental state where you don’t think and in some sense really don’t want to think about if you are procrastinating because whatever procrastination you’re doing makes you feel good or whatever and provides escapism and some parts of your brain wouldn’t want to go away.
At least that’s my experience.
The longer and harder you think about if something is procrastination and come to the conclusion that it isn’t, the more evidence I would say this is that it isn’t procrastination (at least especially if you’re trying to correct for biases).
For me, one important realization was that my original emotions around this kind of assumed a competition where not-winning was actually negative.
Isn’t that what we were trained for? I mean, school is a competition, capitalism is a competition; even many forms of cooperation include a hidden threat that you might be replaced by someone who is better to cooperate with.
(Uh, I am not really satisfied with what I wrote here, but I cannot improve it at the moment, at it feels to me that it’s pointing towards something important, so I am leaving it here.)
You are right. Somehow I had failed to attribute this to culture.
There clearly are lots of systems with a zero-sum competitive mentality.
Compared to the US, the German school and social system seems significantly less competitive to me (from what I can tell, living only in the latter). There still is a lot of competition, but my impression is that there are more niches which provide people with slack.
I think you address an important point. Especially for people who are attracted to LessWrong, there tends to be a lot identification with one’s cognitive abilities. Realizing that there are other people who just are significantly more capable can be emotionally difficult.
For me, one important realization was that my original emotions around this kind of assumed a competition where not-winning was actually negative. When I grokked that a huge fraction of these super capable people are actually trying to do good things, this helped me shift towards mostly being glad if I encounter such people.
Also The Pont of Trade and Being the (Pareto) best in the World are good posts which emphasize that “contributing value” needs way fewer assumptions/abilities than one might think.
Despite a little tear on the ego, it has some advantages not to be the smartest in the room. Having read here on LW a couple of years ago and now bit by bit picking up some of the stuff that happened back then and in the meantime, the dominant feeling for me isn‘t envy of the capability of others, but relief that there are enough minds in the world entertaining thoughts that at least partially reflect my own shallow ones on topics that I deem important, but have no one to talk about.
Unless it involves some mathematics that I am not accustomed to, it feels as if I can follow and understand the majority of thoughts shared on this platform. That provides me with enough encouragment to delve deeper into the topics I am interested in, maybe even enough to work more actively on myself. In any case, it is more than I could hope for hanging out with the guys in the village, where most talk is about cars and gossip.
Yet, when asking myself what I possibly could contribute, the only things that I can come up with are sharing highly subjective experiences of my mind falling apart during manic psychoses, stitching myself together in the aftermath, and making a decent living job-wise and in terms of family life in spite of receiving very pessimistic prognoses for my future when I was in the process of rehabilitation.
I wish I could give more, but I had been spending much of my time playing video games and hanging out with people for senseless fun during my youth. Now, regardless of the degrees I‘ve received, I feel much less educated and capable than I could be.
No one is responsible for his genetic predispositions or his upbringing, but one is responsible for how one acts relating to the values one holds. I fell short on focused self-actualization, so maybe I‘m now the dumbest among the smart.
Now, what is the advantage that I have been talking about? I can probably learn from most of you in a mostly passive consuming style, whithout being obliged (by my morals) to contribute more than this mostly anecdotical comment.
Regarding the issue of hard-coded algorithms determining one‘s cognitive abilities: I‘m not sure about the malleability of deep cognitive processes in general, but I find myself to have undergone significant changes in meta-cognitive abilities as a result of recovery from psychosis. It has the character of some pre-conscious feeling about different trains of subconscious processes, involving both emotions and thoughts. Sometimes it extends to over-reflection that loses hold on some concrete issue and becomes circular, sometimes it helps to steer thinking and general behaviour into a desired direction. I can not remember having said impressions before falling ill and recovering. Thinking about these abilities gives me the impression that highly automated and reinforced sub-conscious routines might not be easily changeable to the more effective or efficient by themselves, but they might be integrated into some higher-order routines, changing their eventual output. These could be more and more automated themselves, thereby achieving an increase in fluid intelligence.
I definitely think that one can become better at understanding and steering the world, by improving their cognitive algorithms. I am just saying that there are some low-level ones that can’t be changed. So improvement needs to happen at a higher level. This then puts some hard limits on how much smarter you can get, and how much effort it takes to gain one unit of smartness.
On the point that you are not sure what you could even do, I just want to say: Did you try? It seems like the most common failure case is to not even try. Another common failure mode to avoid would be to have the wrong expectations about how hard something is, and then give up, because it is so much harder than expected. The hardness is I guess some indication of intelligence. Some people will find doing math just much easier than others, just because they are smarter.
But if you are trying to do something very hard, it might make sense to consider how somebody smart would feel doing this. Would they also struggle and find it difficult, because the problem before you is just intrinsically difficult? I think if you don’t think this thought explicitly, the default implicit assumption is always that what you are doing is easy for everybody else who does it. “Writing a book is a struggle”, is what I heard a professional author once say. Authors are authors, not necessarily because writing is a cakewalk for them. I would think more often than not, it is because they have managed to tune their expectations to reality, such that they no longer feel bad for taking the actually required time for completing whatever task they are working on.
I found what you said about the pre-conscious feeling interesting. It made me slightly improve my model about how to avoid procrastination and depression. Normally I only procrastinate when I feel pretty down (at least the kind of “hardcore” procrastination where you do something that definitely is not productive at all, such as watching a movie or playing a videogame). The problem is that once I am in the state of feeling down it is hard to execute a strategy that actually will make me feel better. For example, doing regular sports and meditation seems to help enormously with changing my general mood for the better. But once I feel really down these things are really hard to do. So what you need to do is develop the habit of carefully paying attention to your experience and notice when you are on a downward spiral, before you have fallen so low that interventions become difficult to implement. And then of cause you still need to actually implement the intervention, but becoming sensitive to subtle emotional trends (which I am still not as good at as I would like) seems to be >25% of the battle.
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago. Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering. Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
You writing this message reflecting on if writing this message is procrastination is probably an indicator for that it is, at least not the worst form of procrastination, which would be about entering a mental state where you don’t think and in some sense really don’t want to think about if you are procrastinating because whatever procrastination you’re doing makes you feel good or whatever and provides escapism and some parts of your brain wouldn’t want to go away.
At least that’s my experience.
The longer and harder you think about if something is procrastination and come to the conclusion that it isn’t, the more evidence I would say this is that it isn’t procrastination (at least especially if you’re trying to correct for biases).
Isn’t that what we were trained for? I mean, school is a competition, capitalism is a competition; even many forms of cooperation include a hidden threat that you might be replaced by someone who is better to cooperate with.
(Uh, I am not really satisfied with what I wrote here, but I cannot improve it at the moment, at it feels to me that it’s pointing towards something important, so I am leaving it here.)
You are right. Somehow I had failed to attribute this to culture. There clearly are lots of systems with a zero-sum competitive mentality.
Compared to the US, the German school and social system seems significantly less competitive to me (from what I can tell, living only in the latter). There still is a lot of competition, but my impression is that there are more niches which provide people with slack.