Thank you for sharing this! I am fascinated by others’ internal experiences, especially when they are well-articulated.
Some of this personally resonates with me, as well. I find it very tempting to implement simple theories and pursue simple goals. Simplicity can be elegant and give the appearance of insight, but it can also be reductionist and result in overfitting to what is ultimately just a poor model of reality.
Internally self-modifying to overfit a very naive self-model is an especially bad trip, and one I have taken multiple times (usually in relatively small ways, usually brought on by moments of hypomania).
It took me a long time to build epistemic humility about myself and to foster productive self-curiosity. Now I tend to use description more than prescription to align myself to my goals. I rule myself with a light hand.
Here is a rough sketch of how I think that works in my own mind:
Somewhere in my psychology is a self-improvement mechanism that I can conceptualize as a function. It takes my values and facts about myself and the world as inputs and returns my actions as outputs. (I’m not completely sure how it got there, but as long as it exists, even if just a seedling, I expect it to grow over time due to its broad instrumental utility.)
I don’t understand this function very well, so I can’t reliably dictate to myself exactly how to improve. I also don’t fully understand my values, so I can’t list them cleanly and force-feed them into the function.
However, this self-improvement mechanism is embedded in the rest of my psychology, so it automatically has weak access to my values and other facts. Just by giving it a little conscious attention and more accurate information about myself and the world, the mechanism tends to do useful things, without a lot of forceful steering.
Thank you for sharing this! I am fascinated by others’ internal experiences, especially when they are well-articulated.
Some of this personally resonates with me, as well. I find it very tempting to implement simple theories and pursue simple goals. Simplicity can be elegant and give the appearance of insight, but it can also be reductionist and result in overfitting to what is ultimately just a poor model of reality. Internally self-modifying to overfit a very naive self-model is an especially bad trip, and one I have taken multiple times (usually in relatively small ways, usually brought on by moments of hypomania).
It took me a long time to build epistemic humility about myself and to foster productive self-curiosity. Now I tend to use description more than prescription to align myself to my goals. I rule myself with a light hand.
Here is a rough sketch of how I think that works in my own mind:
Somewhere in my psychology is a self-improvement mechanism that I can conceptualize as a function. It takes my values and facts about myself and the world as inputs and returns my actions as outputs. (I’m not completely sure how it got there, but as long as it exists, even if just a seedling, I expect it to grow over time due to its broad instrumental utility.) I don’t understand this function very well, so I can’t reliably dictate to myself exactly how to improve. I also don’t fully understand my values, so I can’t list them cleanly and force-feed them into the function. However, this self-improvement mechanism is embedded in the rest of my psychology, so it automatically has weak access to my values and other facts. Just by giving it a little conscious attention and more accurate information about myself and the world, the mechanism tends to do useful things, without a lot of forceful steering.