(I trust I will be forgiven for the overwrought and repetitive prose that follows. In my defense, on this issue, I really do try to think in such terms, and arguably all this drama is a large part of why the method works as well as it does.)
My improvement program, which has been working fairly well so far, although I am still continually refining things as I will detail below, is based on the opposite principle. Rather than setting explicit measurable goals, I try to continually remind myself that every minute and every dime is precious, and every minute and every dime that you don’t spend doing the best thing you can possibly be doing is a mark of sin upon your soul, and furthermore that this is not some extremist dictate, but rather a tautology—that’s what the word “best” means: that which you should be doing. Rather than goals to satisfice, I want to have a utility function to maximize. I do not place myself under some dreaded burden to fulfill some oath: I’m just trying to not be stupid. There is no such thing as “leisure”—everything is booked under “Dayjob” or “Lifework” or “Education” or “Maintenance,” for every book that you read makes you stronger, every problem that you solve increases your beauty, every line that you write is another stitch in your ball gown. It is not: “Once I finish my homework, I can watch the teevee or play flash games on the internet.” As an autodidactic generalist, I either have no homework, or an infinite amount of homework, depending on how you want to phrase things. I don’t want to watch the goddam teevee! Mathematics is more fun than those moronic flash games! Slacking off is not a guilty indulgence; it’s just stupid, and the entirety of my powers are now devoted to the monumental task of not-being-stupid. I recognize no other intertemporal selves to bargain with—I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation. There have been times when I was tempted to go buy an ice cream (“frozen yogurt”) and even took a few steps towards the shop before thinking—is this really what I want? Living as I am on short time, wouldn’t have rather have that four dollars which is equivalent to twenty-four minutes at my crappy dayjob? I prefer the money, so I turned and walked back to my car.
All this is not to say I am in no need of more structure—it would be helpful to keep some sort of schedule or timelog, not in the form of an oath to another self from another time, but simply as a guideline to give direction to my full autodidactic fury. I’ve experimented with this and that, to no notable success so far—but I’m going to keep hacking away at this; sunk costs can’t play into your decision theory, so no number of failures can discourage an expected utility maximizer, though such a thing might happen to a goddam ape.
Am I kidding myself?---in some sense, maybe a little. How much writing have I done?--when allegedly my lifework was supposed to be a work of fiction. Does it only seem like I’ve been being more efficient, because I’ve been doing so much math and programming which leaves a paper trail, as compared to reading which doesn’t? But for once in my life, induction is on my side now: I’ve gotten better before, so I can do so again. I don’t watch teevee any more, and I don’t play flash games—I’m not even tempted. I don’t know what my limits are. So help me.
SECOND ADDENDUM—While I still endorse many of the ideals and sentiments expressed in the parent, I now believe that the comment as written is predicated on a bad model of human psychology. I notice that I am currently confused about the topic of human motivation and have nothing further to say.
Can you give us some numbers? How long have you been doing this? What is your average day (better yet: yesterday) like?
I tried something like this when I was very young—middle school, maybe. I think the most embarrassing part was where I decided I would never have any interest in the opposite sex, because that would be a distraction. It lasted for about a week before I decided maybe there was something to this “being human” thing after all, and put it all down to childhood exuberance and never tried anything of that sort again.
...but if you can actually pull it off, you are my new hero.
I don’t actually have any numbers on hand, and to be clear, I don’t claim to have achieved any level of sheer awesomeness, but rather only that I’m a better person than I used to be. (This is by no means a high bar.) You ask, how long have I been doing this—but I can’t point to any discrete start; my personality has been in a sort of gradual flux in what I’ve been calling “these days of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain”—dating back to my nervous breakdown of 29 November 2007.
This was actually sort of my point: life is continuous. When you have a discrete goal, an explicit program with a start date and an end date, you can just fail. Whereas when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win. You seemed to be saying that when you have an open-ended goal, that just gives you an excuse to cheat. Whereas I’m working under the theory that if I want to cheat, I’ve already lost.
All this might tie into why I can’t deal with school: they give you a curriculum, and all the good thoughts you have that aren’t on the curriculum don’t count, and everything that is on the curriculum that you didn’t do is a mark of sin upon your soul, because you have a duty to perfectly obey the teacher’s commands. It’s too precise—arbitrarily precise. I realize that most people probably aren’t like this—somehow they can muddle through the system without being driven to madness by all the little details. Most people have not thrown crying fits contemplating how they got a B in that poetry class, even though they weren’t sure they did all of the reading, and therefore might not have truly deserved that B. Nor is it common, I imagine, to worry about what constitutes a “reading”—they tell you to read the chapter, but what does that mean?---if my eyes skim over a paragraph, do I have to go back and make sure I touch every word? I just want to be good! What do you want from me?!
I tried to obey. I couldn’t. What would constitute obedience is either underspecified or overspecified; I can’t figure out which. I need a different methodology if I am simply going to exist. Explicit rules and goals sum over far too many details. It might help to have handy verbal guidelines and best practices, but ultimately these are only useful if you really care about what you’re doing. And if you really care about what you’re doing, then you can’t be so utterly dependent on the guidelines. “How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.” I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing. But I think I repeat myself.
Did you go to school, did you go to school for a while and then leave, or are you entirely self-taught?
Your method is clearly better if you are able to think like that successfully, and my method is mostly born from the observation that I can’t. I’ve heard it said that one of the effects of spending a decade or two in the school system is that it twists your mind to think more in the way typical of my system and less in the way typical of yours. And I find that people who managed to avoid school almost entirely, like Eliezer, radiate a sort of psychological healthiness I can only dream of.
I had the same feelings about school as you did, my parents refused to let me leave, and I ended out, over a few years, becoming the sort of person who could tolerate the school experience. Sometimes I worry that the process made me less able to do a lot of other things, like strive for excellence in the way you’re describing.
Posing as the arena in which students will finally get to engage in true mathematical reasoning, this virus attacks mathematics at its heart, destroying the very essence of creative rational argument, poisoning the students’ enjoyment of this fascinating and beautiful subject, and permanently disabling them from thinking about math in a natural and intuitive way.
I haven’t even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.
To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I’ve noticed that I’m better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can’t say how much of that is “innate” “talent”, with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can’t help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there’s a correlation.
If you naturally like learning, school doesn’t take away the opportunity to continue learning naturally, despite the school assignments. I always studied stuff obsessively, and school/university topics rarely correlated with what I was obsessing about at the time. If, on the other hand, you prefer other extracurricular activities, I doubt the absence of school would likely change your course.
The benefits and attractions Z.M. describes are similar to what attracted me to goal system zero. The following three passages from Z.M.’s comments particularly resonated with me.
when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win.
In other words, all you have to do to win the Game of Life is to play the Game the best you can. (And a big part of that is making sure that none of your deliberations are rationalizations in the service of an unacknowledged agenda.)
I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing.
And it is important to stress that oftentimes the best thing for me to do is to get my mind off of all planning and all tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding on a short time scale, so I can relax and rest. (Actually, there is a whole lot more to “keeping the ape happy” than getting enough relaxation and rest, but relaxation and rest illustrate the general point.)
I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation.
One way Z.M. differs from me during my period of loyalty to goal system zero is that the value I assigned to my life and my self flowed entirely from my usefulness to goal system zero. In other words, I did not assign any intrinsic value to my life or my self. Goal system zero was the only source of intrinsic value I recognized. (Z.M. probably differs from the former version of me in a lot of other ways, too.)
Yvain, did you consider how much getting to the point of not having interest in the opposite sex would cost you and harm your ability to achieve your rational goals before abandoning that high standard? It sounds like you’re confusing accepting your humanness as a factor of your current environment versus trying to achieve your goals given the reality in which you exist (which includes your own psychology and current location).
POSTSCRIPT—You know, this had been working so well, but then I seem to have lost the knack in recent months and I don’t know what went wrong. Somehow I need to figure out how to rebuild this fury from scratch.
I think I have experienced something similar repeatedly in the past; and some of my friends experienced it too. It works like this:
I do something very stupid, such as waste a lot of time procrastinating and therefore fail in some important goal. I decide to never make the same mistake again. I feel anger and lot of energy. I read some book or article on motivation / will / planning / whatever way to improve your life. I will make some plan, based on the book, but also tailored to my specific needs. For the first few days (exceptionally: months) the plan works perfectly. I am very happy that I have discovered such perfect method. I feel desire to tell everyone else, but usually people don’t care. And then… somehow… the strategy stops working, and never works again. I simply don’t have the energy to follow it anymore. (A few months or years later the same thing repeats with another strategy.)
So, what does it mean?
First, despite my strong belief that I have found the right method, this effect is probably method-independent, or at least works with a large number of methods. Because I have experienced it a few times, with different methods. It could be prayer, meditation, “getting things done”, writing a list of priorities or life goals, weekly and daily plans, installing a web-blocking software, writing an agreement with myself, setting positive and negative rewards for myself, telling other people my plans, etc. Now I think the exact method is unimportant, but the belief that I have found the best method could be a key component in the process.
Second, after initial success I feel a strong desire to tell other people about my successful method. (Just like you did now.) And I somehow expect to be admired and followed, if the method is proven to work. Now I think, maybe this is the part that makes the whole process work—expectation of social reward. And when this fails; when the method is temporarily successful, but no one except me cares about the details; then the method stops working. (This may be a coincidence, but only once I could follow some system for months: it was a system of regular physical exercise I found on internet, called “5BX”. Also, only for this system I have received positive social feedback; many people asked me to send them this plan.) Sometimes I think that following my method would be easier if I knew some other people are following the same method.
So now it seems to me that when I follow some cool methods, I am actually expecting two kinds of rewards: improving my life, and getting social reward for using the right method. When I don’t get the social reward, I lose energy to follow the system, even if the system improved my life in other aspects. Possible fix? Perhaps, don’t forget to use the system for things that generate social reward quickly.
OK, this is how it works for me, maybe not for you, but I felt like I noticed some similarities.
You know, this had been working so well, but then I seem to have lost the knack in recent months and I don’t know what went wrong. Somehow I need to figure out how to rebuild this fury from scratch.
An observation I have made from my own experience is that fury is powerful fuel that is best used as a trigger for self awareness. It is best used to develop an observing ego and give myself direction that can then be used with a calm sense of purpose. Fury is not for long term consumption and our minds will tend towards homoeostasis even if that means sabotaging all our good intentions to get to that balance.
I would perhaps make an exception for the context if I thought Zack’s strategy was even remotely effective. But I’m not going to encourage futile self flagellation by allowing self directed slander an exception to my usual standards. Here isn’t the place for calling people retarded, particularly when their problem has almost nothing to do with delayed or substandard intellectual development.
A more useful criticism would be:
Insane. Insane. Insane. Insane.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
That’s a stupid quote. The fact that it’s often attributed to Ben Franklin is even more ridiculous. Insanity (psychological problems) rarely includes that as a symptom, and even when it does it’s only a small part of the problem. (OCD doesn’t count, because the compulsion doesn’t include a belief that this time will be any different.)
Replace “insanity” with “stupidity” and the quote isn’t quite as stupid.
I have a particularly nasty relationship with that particular quote. And, an even more toxic relationship with the group that seems to popularize that quote. Seems that they are the bastion of an acutely massive amount of crazy themselves, yet seem to be blind to that fact.
Oh, it’s not so bad a quote. If we define sanity around here as being more Bayesian (that’s the waterline we’re trying to raise, right?) then defining insanity as refusal to update when more data comes would make sense.
My attempts to adopt a similar attitude have basically resulted in an infinite regress of trying to figure what “best” is and why, which wasn’t conducive to actually doing anything. Do you just already know what you want from life, or do you have some method of dealing with goal-uncertainty?
Um, yeah, I was actually suffering from that just now after having written my other long comment in this thread. I know what I want; I have plenty of selfish goals, for there’s always another book that you haven’t read, and there’s always more math that you don’t know, and I have far too many ideas of my own to follow up on, and one particular set of ideas that I thought was particularly important (to me)---and surely I can get a better dayjob, and I have a few friends, and I could be very happy this way for a very long time---
But then I start worrying that I am insufficiently “contributing to society,” or mitigating existential risks, or whatever, and this is a much harder problem of which I am not even capable of thinking clearly about.
I find myself afraid to criticize this perspective, because it seems that if you came to believe less in its effectiveness, it might make the technique stop working. I would not want to inflict this harm upon you.
No, no! On my honor as an aspiring rationalist, I am obligated to relinquish my cherished beliefs if and only if they are false, and to expose myself to evidence for the same. Go on! Crocker’s rules! Stab me with the truth!
Z.M. You didn’t have the belief that everyone would anticipate your procedure’s success.
You did have the belief that some people would sometimes be polite to you. Now, here you are in the “should world” saying that no-one should ever be polite to you.
I’m particularly concerned because I think I sniff a whiff of aspiration towards mental toughness, of “tell me the awful truth, if I can’t take it I don’t deserve the benefits of a lie” rather than “tell me the truth, reality is what it is, only relative awfulness exists and relative awfulness is a feature of the map, not of the territory, a feature of worlds which could never be, in which my illusion of free will failed and the deterministic abstract ideal dynamic that I am, in contemplation of a choice that it was determined to reject, instead chose the relatively awful seeming option that by the dynamic that I am must be rejected”.
Living as I am on short time, wouldn’t have rather have that four dollars which is equivalent to twenty-four minutes at my crappy dayjob? I prefer the money, so I turned and walked back to my car.
I think this is a fantastic method. What’s more, you may be able to do it without the messy work of having to continually remind yourself.
Just find a way of expressing what you really want, or what you feel like you need to keep reminding yourself of, in a single sentence. Do it in a way that RESONATES with you—every time you read it it should motivate you to get off your ass and go do whatever it tells you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be written by you, just express your desire. Example: I use the famous Fight Club quote “This is your life, and it’s ending one second at a time”.
Then just write (or print) this on a piece of paper, big enough to read, and tape it somewhere you’ll see it all the time. Essentially a motivational poster, but with content that actually IS motivational (because you picked it out), not just an eagle flying over a mountain with the word “integrity” under it.
Instead of having to remind yourself constantly, the piece of paper will do that work for you. But I’m guessing the mechanism at work is the same—the message seeps slowly into your subconscious, influencing your thoughts so that, eventually, you don’t need reminding. If it works at all for you like it did for me, every single thought you have, every action you take will be thought of in terms of this goal or desire (so it’s important to pick a good one). You don’t need to, for example, force yourself to read instead of watching tv—watching tv will feel so wrong that you will be repelled from it.
In essence, instead of trying to fight your subconscious desires, change them and use them to your advantage.
I taped my resolution to my wall, and used a green dry erase marker to write LW on it, to remind me to be “less wrong” and follow the damn resolution Why a green LW? Well, on my bookmarks toolbar in Chrome, the symbol for the website is a green LW. I think I need to change my computer’s wallpaper to something suitable, since that is on of my primary distractions.
(I trust I will be forgiven for the overwrought and repetitive prose that follows. In my defense, on this issue, I really do try to think in such terms, and arguably all this drama is a large part of why the method works as well as it does.)
My improvement program, which has been working fairly well so far, although I am still continually refining things as I will detail below, is based on the opposite principle. Rather than setting explicit measurable goals, I try to continually remind myself that every minute and every dime is precious, and every minute and every dime that you don’t spend doing the best thing you can possibly be doing is a mark of sin upon your soul, and furthermore that this is not some extremist dictate, but rather a tautology—that’s what the word “best” means: that which you should be doing. Rather than goals to satisfice, I want to have a utility function to maximize. I do not place myself under some dreaded burden to fulfill some oath: I’m just trying to not be stupid. There is no such thing as “leisure”—everything is booked under “Dayjob” or “Lifework” or “Education” or “Maintenance,” for every book that you read makes you stronger, every problem that you solve increases your beauty, every line that you write is another stitch in your ball gown. It is not: “Once I finish my homework, I can watch the teevee or play flash games on the internet.” As an autodidactic generalist, I either have no homework, or an infinite amount of homework, depending on how you want to phrase things. I don’t want to watch the goddam teevee! Mathematics is more fun than those moronic flash games! Slacking off is not a guilty indulgence; it’s just stupid, and the entirety of my powers are now devoted to the monumental task of not-being-stupid. I recognize no other intertemporal selves to bargain with—I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation. There have been times when I was tempted to go buy an ice cream (“frozen yogurt”) and even took a few steps towards the shop before thinking—is this really what I want? Living as I am on short time, wouldn’t have rather have that four dollars which is equivalent to twenty-four minutes at my crappy dayjob? I prefer the money, so I turned and walked back to my car.
All this is not to say I am in no need of more structure—it would be helpful to keep some sort of schedule or timelog, not in the form of an oath to another self from another time, but simply as a guideline to give direction to my full autodidactic fury. I’ve experimented with this and that, to no notable success so far—but I’m going to keep hacking away at this; sunk costs can’t play into your decision theory, so no number of failures can discourage an expected utility maximizer, though such a thing might happen to a goddam ape.
Am I kidding myself?---in some sense, maybe a little. How much writing have I done?--when allegedly my lifework was supposed to be a work of fiction. Does it only seem like I’ve been being more efficient, because I’ve been doing so much math and programming which leaves a paper trail, as compared to reading which doesn’t? But for once in my life, induction is on my side now: I’ve gotten better before, so I can do so again. I don’t watch teevee any more, and I don’t play flash games—I’m not even tempted. I don’t know what my limits are. So help me.
SECOND ADDENDUM—While I still endorse many of the ideals and sentiments expressed in the parent, I now believe that the comment as written is predicated on a bad model of human psychology. I notice that I am currently confused about the topic of human motivation and have nothing further to say.
Thanks for checking in. I hope you’ll update us further if matters clarify.
Can you give us some numbers? How long have you been doing this? What is your average day (better yet: yesterday) like?
I tried something like this when I was very young—middle school, maybe. I think the most embarrassing part was where I decided I would never have any interest in the opposite sex, because that would be a distraction. It lasted for about a week before I decided maybe there was something to this “being human” thing after all, and put it all down to childhood exuberance and never tried anything of that sort again.
...but if you can actually pull it off, you are my new hero.
I don’t actually have any numbers on hand, and to be clear, I don’t claim to have achieved any level of sheer awesomeness, but rather only that I’m a better person than I used to be. (This is by no means a high bar.) You ask, how long have I been doing this—but I can’t point to any discrete start; my personality has been in a sort of gradual flux in what I’ve been calling “these days of Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain”—dating back to my nervous breakdown of 29 November 2007.
This was actually sort of my point: life is continuous. When you have a discrete goal, an explicit program with a start date and an end date, you can just fail. Whereas when you have an open-ended concept of things-worth-doing, there’s no failure, only degrees of win. You seemed to be saying that when you have an open-ended goal, that just gives you an excuse to cheat. Whereas I’m working under the theory that if I want to cheat, I’ve already lost.
All this might tie into why I can’t deal with school: they give you a curriculum, and all the good thoughts you have that aren’t on the curriculum don’t count, and everything that is on the curriculum that you didn’t do is a mark of sin upon your soul, because you have a duty to perfectly obey the teacher’s commands. It’s too precise—arbitrarily precise. I realize that most people probably aren’t like this—somehow they can muddle through the system without being driven to madness by all the little details. Most people have not thrown crying fits contemplating how they got a B in that poetry class, even though they weren’t sure they did all of the reading, and therefore might not have truly deserved that B. Nor is it common, I imagine, to worry about what constitutes a “reading”—they tell you to read the chapter, but what does that mean?---if my eyes skim over a paragraph, do I have to go back and make sure I touch every word? I just want to be good! What do you want from me?!
I tried to obey. I couldn’t. What would constitute obedience is either underspecified or overspecified; I can’t figure out which. I need a different methodology if I am simply going to exist. Explicit rules and goals sum over far too many details. It might help to have handy verbal guidelines and best practices, but ultimately these are only useful if you really care about what you’re doing. And if you really care about what you’re doing, then you can’t be so utterly dependent on the guidelines. “How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.” I really think it is a tautology that you should always be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing. You can’t stop time; you’re always going to be doing something, even if that something is nothing in particular. And so if you have to do some uniquely determined thing—it should be the best thing. But I think I repeat myself.
Did you go to school, did you go to school for a while and then leave, or are you entirely self-taught?
Your method is clearly better if you are able to think like that successfully, and my method is mostly born from the observation that I can’t. I’ve heard it said that one of the effects of spending a decade or two in the school system is that it twists your mind to think more in the way typical of my system and less in the way typical of yours. And I find that people who managed to avoid school almost entirely, like Eliezer, radiate a sort of psychological healthiness I can only dream of.
I had the same feelings about school as you did, my parents refused to let me leave, and I ended out, over a few years, becoming the sort of person who could tolerate the school experience. Sometimes I worry that the process made me less able to do a lot of other things, like strive for excellence in the way you’re describing.
Scott Aaronson writes about A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart.
For example, a quote about school geometry:
I haven’t even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.
To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I’ve noticed that I’m better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can’t say how much of that is “innate” “talent”, with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can’t help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there’s a correlation.
compared to what? evidence?
The Lockhart piece is great and deserves to be much better known. The only bad thing about it is that it pisses the reader off.
Thanks for the link to Aaronson’s commentary; I hadn’t seen it.
It does? I thought it was more heartbreakingly tragic than anything else.
The second; high school diploma and fifty-five credits at UCSC.
If you naturally like learning, school doesn’t take away the opportunity to continue learning naturally, despite the school assignments. I always studied stuff obsessively, and school/university topics rarely correlated with what I was obsessing about at the time. If, on the other hand, you prefer other extracurricular activities, I doubt the absence of school would likely change your course.
The benefits and attractions Z.M. describes are similar to what attracted me to goal system zero. The following three passages from Z.M.’s comments particularly resonated with me.
In other words, all you have to do to win the Game of Life is to play the Game the best you can. (And a big part of that is making sure that none of your deliberations are rationalizations in the service of an unacknowledged agenda.)
And it is important to stress that oftentimes the best thing for me to do is to get my mind off of all planning and all tasks that are not intrinsically rewarding on a short time scale, so I can relax and rest. (Actually, there is a whole lot more to “keeping the ape happy” than getting enough relaxation and rest, but relaxation and rest illustrate the general point.)
One way Z.M. differs from me during my period of loyalty to goal system zero is that the value I assigned to my life and my self flowed entirely from my usefulness to goal system zero. In other words, I did not assign any intrinsic value to my life or my self. Goal system zero was the only source of intrinsic value I recognized. (Z.M. probably differs from the former version of me in a lot of other ways, too.)
Yvain, did you consider how much getting to the point of not having interest in the opposite sex would cost you and harm your ability to achieve your rational goals before abandoning that high standard? It sounds like you’re confusing accepting your humanness as a factor of your current environment versus trying to achieve your goals given the reality in which you exist (which includes your own psychology and current location).
POSTSCRIPT—You know, this had been working so well, but then I seem to have lost the knack in recent months and I don’t know what went wrong. Somehow I need to figure out how to rebuild this fury from scratch.
I think I have experienced something similar repeatedly in the past; and some of my friends experienced it too. It works like this:
I do something very stupid, such as waste a lot of time procrastinating and therefore fail in some important goal. I decide to never make the same mistake again. I feel anger and lot of energy. I read some book or article on motivation / will / planning / whatever way to improve your life. I will make some plan, based on the book, but also tailored to my specific needs. For the first few days (exceptionally: months) the plan works perfectly. I am very happy that I have discovered such perfect method. I feel desire to tell everyone else, but usually people don’t care. And then… somehow… the strategy stops working, and never works again. I simply don’t have the energy to follow it anymore. (A few months or years later the same thing repeats with another strategy.)
So, what does it mean?
First, despite my strong belief that I have found the right method, this effect is probably method-independent, or at least works with a large number of methods. Because I have experienced it a few times, with different methods. It could be prayer, meditation, “getting things done”, writing a list of priorities or life goals, weekly and daily plans, installing a web-blocking software, writing an agreement with myself, setting positive and negative rewards for myself, telling other people my plans, etc. Now I think the exact method is unimportant, but the belief that I have found the best method could be a key component in the process.
Second, after initial success I feel a strong desire to tell other people about my successful method. (Just like you did now.) And I somehow expect to be admired and followed, if the method is proven to work. Now I think, maybe this is the part that makes the whole process work—expectation of social reward. And when this fails; when the method is temporarily successful, but no one except me cares about the details; then the method stops working. (This may be a coincidence, but only once I could follow some system for months: it was a system of regular physical exercise I found on internet, called “5BX”. Also, only for this system I have received positive social feedback; many people asked me to send them this plan.) Sometimes I think that following my method would be easier if I knew some other people are following the same method.
So now it seems to me that when I follow some cool methods, I am actually expecting two kinds of rewards: improving my life, and getting social reward for using the right method. When I don’t get the social reward, I lose energy to follow the system, even if the system improved my life in other aspects. Possible fix? Perhaps, don’t forget to use the system for things that generate social reward quickly.
OK, this is how it works for me, maybe not for you, but I felt like I noticed some similarities.
An observation I have made from my own experience is that fury is powerful fuel that is best used as a trigger for self awareness. It is best used to develop an observing ego and give myself direction that can then be used with a calm sense of purpose. Fury is not for long term consumption and our minds will tend towards homoeostasis even if that means sabotaging all our good intentions to get to that balance.
retarded retarded retarded retarded
Downvoted for name-calling and incomprehensibility, but mostly for name-calling.
He’s replying to himself.
I don’t see how that redeems the comment.
I tend to agree.
I would perhaps make an exception for the context if I thought Zack’s strategy was even remotely effective. But I’m not going to encourage futile self flagellation by allowing self directed slander an exception to my usual standards. Here isn’t the place for calling people retarded, particularly when their problem has almost nothing to do with delayed or substandard intellectual development.
A more useful criticism would be:
Insane. Insane. Insane. Insane.
That’s a stupid quote. The fact that it’s often attributed to Ben Franklin is even more ridiculous. Insanity (psychological problems) rarely includes that as a symptom, and even when it does it’s only a small part of the problem. (OCD doesn’t count, because the compulsion doesn’t include a belief that this time will be any different.)
Replace “insanity” with “stupidity” and the quote isn’t quite as stupid.
I have a particularly nasty relationship with that particular quote. And, an even more toxic relationship with the group that seems to popularize that quote. Seems that they are the bastion of an acutely massive amount of crazy themselves, yet seem to be blind to that fact.
Oh, it’s not so bad a quote. If we define sanity around here as being more Bayesian (that’s the waterline we’re trying to raise, right?) then defining insanity as refusal to update when more data comes would make sense.
I have but one Self, a timeless abstract optimization process to which this ape is but a horribly disfigured approximation.
Umm, it seems like huge error to me to think that there is anything but the ape.
I think he’s just putting mental software (brain state) above hardware.
Well, it seems to me like a huge error to think there’s anything there but ape software. How is an ape’s mind an approximation of something else?
well, there’s the mind he would self modify into if he could.
So how is his current mind an approximation of that?
My attempts to adopt a similar attitude have basically resulted in an infinite regress of trying to figure what “best” is and why, which wasn’t conducive to actually doing anything. Do you just already know what you want from life, or do you have some method of dealing with goal-uncertainty?
Um, yeah, I was actually suffering from that just now after having written my other long comment in this thread. I know what I want; I have plenty of selfish goals, for there’s always another book that you haven’t read, and there’s always more math that you don’t know, and I have far too many ideas of my own to follow up on, and one particular set of ideas that I thought was particularly important (to me)---and surely I can get a better dayjob, and I have a few friends, and I could be very happy this way for a very long time---
But then I start worrying that I am insufficiently “contributing to society,” or mitigating existential risks, or whatever, and this is a much harder problem of which I am not even capable of thinking clearly about.
I find myself afraid to criticize this perspective, because it seems that if you came to believe less in its effectiveness, it might make the technique stop working. I would not want to inflict this harm upon you.
No, no! On my honor as an aspiring rationalist, I am obligated to relinquish my cherished beliefs if and only if they are false, and to expose myself to evidence for the same. Go on! Crocker’s rules! Stab me with the truth!
Z.M. You didn’t have the belief that everyone would anticipate your procedure’s success. You did have the belief that some people would sometimes be polite to you.
Now, here you are in the “should world” saying that no-one should ever be polite to you.
I’m particularly concerned because I think I sniff a whiff of aspiration towards mental toughness, of “tell me the awful truth, if I can’t take it I don’t deserve the benefits of a lie” rather than “tell me the truth, reality is what it is, only relative awfulness exists and relative awfulness is a feature of the map, not of the territory, a feature of worlds which could never be, in which my illusion of free will failed and the deterministic abstract ideal dynamic that I am, in contemplation of a choice that it was determined to reject, instead chose the relatively awful seeming option that by the dynamic that I am must be rejected”.
Well said!
I also seem to operate in this mode. Though I am not exclusively an autodidact.
I think this is a fantastic method. What’s more, you may be able to do it without the messy work of having to continually remind yourself.
Just find a way of expressing what you really want, or what you feel like you need to keep reminding yourself of, in a single sentence. Do it in a way that RESONATES with you—every time you read it it should motivate you to get off your ass and go do whatever it tells you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be written by you, just express your desire. Example: I use the famous Fight Club quote “This is your life, and it’s ending one second at a time”.
Then just write (or print) this on a piece of paper, big enough to read, and tape it somewhere you’ll see it all the time. Essentially a motivational poster, but with content that actually IS motivational (because you picked it out), not just an eagle flying over a mountain with the word “integrity” under it.
Instead of having to remind yourself constantly, the piece of paper will do that work for you. But I’m guessing the mechanism at work is the same—the message seeps slowly into your subconscious, influencing your thoughts so that, eventually, you don’t need reminding. If it works at all for you like it did for me, every single thought you have, every action you take will be thought of in terms of this goal or desire (so it’s important to pick a good one). You don’t need to, for example, force yourself to read instead of watching tv—watching tv will feel so wrong that you will be repelled from it.
In essence, instead of trying to fight your subconscious desires, change them and use them to your advantage.
I taped my resolution to my wall, and used a green dry erase marker to write LW on it, to remind me to be “less wrong” and follow the damn resolution Why a green LW? Well, on my bookmarks toolbar in Chrome, the symbol for the website is a green LW. I think I need to change my computer’s wallpaper to something suitable, since that is on of my primary distractions.