Does anyone have thoughts about avoiding failure modes of this sort?
Especially in the “least convenient possible world” where some of the bullet points are actually true—like, if we’re disseminating principles for wannabe AI Manhattan Projects, and we’re optimizing the principles for the possibility that one of the wannabe AI Manhattan Projects is the real deal, what principles should we disseminate?
Most of my ideas are around “staying grounded”—spend significant time hanging out with “normies” who don’t buy into your worldview, maintain your sense of humor, fully unplug from work at least one day per week, have hobbies outside of work (perhaps optimizing explicitly for escapism in the form of computer games, TV shows, etc.) Possibly live somewhere other than the Bay Area, someplace with fewer alternative lifestyles and a stronger sense of community. (I think Oxford has been compared favorably to Berkeley with regard to presence of homeless people, at least.)
But I’m just guessing, and I encourage others to share their thoughts. Especially people who’ve observed/experienced mental health crises firsthand—how could they have been prevented?
EDIT: I’m also curious how to think about scrupulosity. It seems to me that team members for an AI Manhattan Project should ideally have more scrupulosity/paranoia than average, for obvious reasons. (“A bit above the population average” might be somewhere around “they can count on one hand the number of times they blacked out while drinking”—I suspect communities like ours already select for high-ish levels of scrupulosity.) However, my initial guess is that instead of directing that scrupulosity towards implementation of some sort of monastic ideal, they should instead direct that scrupulosity towards trying to make sure their plan doesn’t fail in some way they didn’t anticipate, trying to make sure their code doesn’t have any bugs, monitoring their power-seeking tendencies, seeking out informed critics to learn from, making sure they themselves aren’t a single point of failure, making sure that important secrets stay secret, etc. (what else should be on this list?) But, how much paranoia/scrupulosity is too much?
IMO, A large number of mental health professionals simply aren’t a good fit for high intelligence people having philosophical crises. People know this and intuitively avoid the large hassle and expense of sorting through a large number of bad matches. Finding solid people to refer to who are not otherwise associated with the community in any way would be helpful.
I know someone who may be able to help with finding good mental health professionals for those situations; anyone who’s reading this is welcome to PM me for contact info.
I don’t know how good it is yet. I just emailed them last week, and we set up an appointment for this upcoming Wednesday. I might report back later, as things progress.
Unfortunately, by participating in this community (LW/etc.), we’ve disqualified ourselves from asking Scott to be our doctor (should I call him “Dr. Alexander” when talking about him-as-a-medical-professional while using his alias when he’s not in a clinical environment?).
I concur with your comment about having trouble finding a good doctor for people like us. p(find a good doctor) is already low and difficult given the small n (also known as the doctor shortage). If you combine p(doctor works well with people like us), the result may rapidly approach epsilon.
Does anyone have thoughts about avoiding failure modes of this sort?
Meredith from Status451 here. I’ve been through a few psychotic episodes of my own, often with paranoid features, for reasons wholly unrelated to anything being discussed at the object-level here; they’re unpleasant enough, both while they’re going on and while cleaning up the mess afterward, that I have strong incentives to figure out how to avoid these kinds of failure modes! The patterns I’ve noticed are, of course, only from my own experience, but maybe relating them will be helpful.
Instrumental scrupulousness is a fantastic tool. By “instrumental scrupulousness” I simply mean pointing my scrupulousness at trying to make sure I’m not doing something I can’t undo. More or less what you describe in your edit, honestly. As for how much is too much, you absolutely don’t want to paralyse yourself into inaction through constantly second-guessing yourself. Real artists ship, after all!
Living someplace with good mental health care has been super crucial for me. In my case that’s Belgium. I’ve only had to commit myself once, but it saved my life and was, bizarrely, one of the most autonomy-respecting experiences I’ve ever had. The US healthcare system is caught in a horrifically large principal-agent problem, and I don’t know if it can extricate itself. Yeeting myself to another continent was literally the path of least resistance for me to find adequate, trustworthy care.
Secrecy is overrated and most things are nothingburgers. I’ve learned to identify certain thought patterns—catastrophisation, for example—as maladaptive, and while it’ll probably always be a work in progress, the worst thing that actually does happen is usually far less awful than I imagined.
The “quit trying so hard and just do it” approach that you and nostalgebraist are gesturing at pays rent, IMO. Christian’s and Avi’s advice about cultivating stable and rewarding friendships and family relationships also comports with my experience.
I do think that encouraging people to stay in contact with their family and work to have good relationships is very useful. Family can provide a form of grounding that having small talk with normies while going dancing or persuing other hobbies doesn’t provide.
When deciding whether a personal development group is culty I think it’s a good test to ask whether or not the work of the group lead to the average person in the group having better or worse relationships with their parents.
I agree, and think it’s important to ‘stay grounded’ in the ‘normal world’ if you’re involved in any sort of intense organization or endeavor.
You’ve made some great suggestions.
I would also suggest that having a spouse who preferably isn’t too involved, or involved at all, and maybe even some kids, is another commonality among people who find it easier to avoid going too far down these rabbit holes. Also, having a family is positive in countless other ways, and what I consider part of the ‘good life’ for most people.
Does anyone have thoughts about avoiding failure modes of this sort?
Especially in the “least convenient possible world” where some of the bullet points are actually true—like, if we’re disseminating principles for wannabe AI Manhattan Projects, and we’re optimizing the principles for the possibility that one of the wannabe AI Manhattan Projects is the real deal, what principles should we disseminate?
Most of my ideas are around “staying grounded”—spend significant time hanging out with “normies” who don’t buy into your worldview, maintain your sense of humor, fully unplug from work at least one day per week, have hobbies outside of work (perhaps optimizing explicitly for escapism in the form of computer games, TV shows, etc.) Possibly live somewhere other than the Bay Area, someplace with fewer alternative lifestyles and a stronger sense of community. (I think Oxford has been compared favorably to Berkeley with regard to presence of homeless people, at least.)
But I’m just guessing, and I encourage others to share their thoughts. Especially people who’ve observed/experienced mental health crises firsthand—how could they have been prevented?
EDIT: I’m also curious how to think about scrupulosity. It seems to me that team members for an AI Manhattan Project should ideally have more scrupulosity/paranoia than average, for obvious reasons. (“A bit above the population average” might be somewhere around “they can count on one hand the number of times they blacked out while drinking”—I suspect communities like ours already select for high-ish levels of scrupulosity.) However, my initial guess is that instead of directing that scrupulosity towards implementation of some sort of monastic ideal, they should instead direct that scrupulosity towards trying to make sure their plan doesn’t fail in some way they didn’t anticipate, trying to make sure their code doesn’t have any bugs, monitoring their power-seeking tendencies, seeking out informed critics to learn from, making sure they themselves aren’t a single point of failure, making sure that important secrets stay secret, etc. (what else should be on this list?) But, how much paranoia/scrupulosity is too much?
IMO, A large number of mental health professionals simply aren’t a good fit for high intelligence people having philosophical crises. People know this and intuitively avoid the large hassle and expense of sorting through a large number of bad matches. Finding solid people to refer to who are not otherwise associated with the community in any way would be helpful.
I know someone who may be able to help with finding good mental health professionals for those situations; anyone who’s reading this is welcome to PM me for contact info.
There’s an “EA Mental Health Navigator” now to help people connect to the right care.
https://eamentalhealth.wixsite.com/navigator
I don’t know how good it is yet. I just emailed them last week, and we set up an appointment for this upcoming Wednesday. I might report back later, as things progress.
Unfortunately, by participating in this community (LW/etc.), we’ve disqualified ourselves from asking Scott to be our doctor (should I call him “Dr. Alexander” when talking about him-as-a-medical-professional while using his alias when he’s not in a clinical environment?).
I concur with your comment about having trouble finding a good doctor for people like us. p(find a good doctor) is already low and difficult given the small n (also known as the doctor shortage). If you combine p(doctor works well with people like us), the result may rapidly approach epsilon.
It seems that the best advice is to make n bigger by seeking care in a place with a large per capita population of the doctors you need. For example, by combining https://nccd.cdc.gov/CKD/detail.aspx?Qnum=Q600 with the US Census ACS 2013 population estimates (https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Counts,%20Estimates,%20and%20Projections%3APopulation%20Total&g=0100000US%240400000&y=2013&tid=ACSDT1Y2013.B01003&hidePreview=true&tp=true), we see that the following states had >=0.9 primary care doctors per 1,000 people:
District of Columbia (1.4)
Vermont (1.1)
Massachusetts (1.0)
Maryland (0.9)
Minnesota (0.9)
Rhode Island (0.9)
New York (0.9)
Connecticut (0.9)
Meredith from Status451 here. I’ve been through a few psychotic episodes of my own, often with paranoid features, for reasons wholly unrelated to anything being discussed at the object-level here; they’re unpleasant enough, both while they’re going on and while cleaning up the mess afterward, that I have strong incentives to figure out how to avoid these kinds of failure modes! The patterns I’ve noticed are, of course, only from my own experience, but maybe relating them will be helpful.
Instrumental scrupulousness is a fantastic tool. By “instrumental scrupulousness” I simply mean pointing my scrupulousness at trying to make sure I’m not doing something I can’t undo. More or less what you describe in your edit, honestly. As for how much is too much, you absolutely don’t want to paralyse yourself into inaction through constantly second-guessing yourself. Real artists ship, after all!
Living someplace with good mental health care has been super crucial for me. In my case that’s Belgium. I’ve only had to commit myself once, but it saved my life and was, bizarrely, one of the most autonomy-respecting experiences I’ve ever had. The US healthcare system is caught in a horrifically large principal-agent problem, and I don’t know if it can extricate itself. Yeeting myself to another continent was literally the path of least resistance for me to find adequate, trustworthy care.
Secrecy is overrated and most things are nothingburgers. I’ve learned to identify certain thought patterns—catastrophisation, for example—as maladaptive, and while it’ll probably always be a work in progress, the worst thing that actually does happen is usually far less awful than I imagined.
The “quit trying so hard and just do it” approach that you and nostalgebraist are gesturing at pays rent, IMO. Christian’s and Avi’s advice about cultivating stable and rewarding friendships and family relationships also comports with my experience.
I do think that encouraging people to stay in contact with their family and work to have good relationships is very useful. Family can provide a form of grounding that having small talk with normies while going dancing or persuing other hobbies doesn’t provide.
When deciding whether a personal development group is culty I think it’s a good test to ask whether or not the work of the group lead to the average person in the group having better or worse relationships with their parents.
I agree, and think it’s important to ‘stay grounded’ in the ‘normal world’ if you’re involved in any sort of intense organization or endeavor.
You’ve made some great suggestions.
I would also suggest that having a spouse who preferably isn’t too involved, or involved at all, and maybe even some kids, is another commonality among people who find it easier to avoid going too far down these rabbit holes. Also, having a family is positive in countless other ways, and what I consider part of the ‘good life’ for most people.