Understanding mental biases and how our brain plays tricks on it is a core part of LW. It hasn’t much to do with logical argument but with modern psychological research.
It’s no easy skill to notice when your emotions prevent you from clearly thinking about an issue.
Saying “The nature of outside views is that they are going to be wrong eventually.” is also very particular. If I’m testing gravity by repeating scientific experiments whereby I drop balls, I’m engaging in the outside view.
Science is all about the outside view instead of subjective experience.
When one is subject to a mental illnesses that generally is known to make on think irrationally about an issue, it’s useful to not trust one’s reasoning and instead seek help for the mental illness by trustworthy people.
Bootstrapping trust isn’t easy. There are valid reasons why you might not trust the average psychologists enough to trust his judgement over your own.
The general approach is too find trustworthy in person friends. For LW type ideas, you find them at LW meetups. You likely don’t want to pull all your information from people from a LW meetup but if your LW friends say that you are irrational about an issue, your mainstream psychologists tells you, you are irrational about the issue and other social contacts also tell you that you are irrational, no matter how strongly it feels like you are right, you should assume that you aren’t right.
Well, I definitely know that my depression is causally tied to my existential pessimism. I just don’t if it’s the only factor, or if fixing something else will stop it for good. But as I said, I don’t necessarily want to default to ape mode.
I definitely know that my depression is causally tied to my existential pessimism.
Out of curiosity, how do you know that this is the direction of the causal link? The experiences you have mentioned in the thread seem to also be consistent with depression causing you to get hung up on existential pessimism.
I go through long periods of peace, only to find my world completely shaken as I experience some fearful epiphany. And I’ve experienced a complete cessation of that feeling when it is decisively refuted.
Okay, but at best, this shows that the immediate cause of you being shaken and coming out of it is related to fearful epiphanies. Is it not plausible that the reason that, at a given time, you find particular idea horrific or are able to accept a solution as satisfying depending on your mental state?
Consider this hypothetical narrative. Let Frank (name chosen at random) be a person suffering from occasional bouts of depression. When he is healthy, he notices an enjoys interacting with the world around him. When he is depressed, he instead focuses on real or imagined problems in his life—and in particular, how stressful his work is.
When asked, Frank explains that his depression is caused by problems at work. He explains that when he gets assigned a particularly unpleasant project, his depression flares up. The depression doesn’t clear up until things get easier. Frank explains that once he finishes a project and is assigned something else, his depression clears up (unless the new project is just as bad); or sometimes, through much struggle, he figure out how to make the project bearable, and that resolves the depression as well.
Frank is genuine in expressing his feelings, and correct about work problems being correlated with his depression, but he is wrong about causation between the two.
Do you find this story analogous to your situation? If not, why not?
Of course you do, as the pressures for internal mental consistency are very strong.
This isn’t an argument, it’s Descartes’ demon.
Understanding mental biases and how our brain plays tricks on it is a core part of LW. It hasn’t much to do with logical argument but with modern psychological research.
It’s no easy skill to notice when your emotions prevent you from clearly thinking about an issue.
Saying “The nature of outside views is that they are going to be wrong eventually.” is also very particular. If I’m testing gravity by repeating scientific experiments whereby I drop balls, I’m engaging in the outside view. Science is all about the outside view instead of subjective experience.
When one is subject to a mental illnesses that generally is known to make on think irrationally about an issue, it’s useful to not trust one’s reasoning and instead seek help for the mental illness by trustworthy people. Bootstrapping trust isn’t easy. There are valid reasons why you might not trust the average psychologists enough to trust his judgement over your own.
The general approach is too find trustworthy in person friends. For LW type ideas, you find them at LW meetups. You likely don’t want to pull all your information from people from a LW meetup but if your LW friends say that you are irrational about an issue, your mainstream psychologists tells you, you are irrational about the issue and other social contacts also tell you that you are irrational, no matter how strongly it feels like you are right, you should assume that you aren’t right.
Well, I definitely know that my depression is causally tied to my existential pessimism. I just don’t if it’s the only factor, or if fixing something else will stop it for good. But as I said, I don’t necessarily want to default to ape mode.
Out of curiosity, how do you know that this is the direction of the causal link? The experiences you have mentioned in the thread seem to also be consistent with depression causing you to get hung up on existential pessimism.
I go through long periods of peace, only to find my world completely shaken as I experience some fearful epiphany. And I’ve experienced a complete cessation of that feeling when it is decisively refuted.
Okay, but at best, this shows that the immediate cause of you being shaken and coming out of it is related to fearful epiphanies. Is it not plausible that the reason that, at a given time, you find particular idea horrific or are able to accept a solution as satisfying depending on your mental state?
Consider this hypothetical narrative. Let Frank (name chosen at random) be a person suffering from occasional bouts of depression. When he is healthy, he notices an enjoys interacting with the world around him. When he is depressed, he instead focuses on real or imagined problems in his life—and in particular, how stressful his work is.
When asked, Frank explains that his depression is caused by problems at work. He explains that when he gets assigned a particularly unpleasant project, his depression flares up. The depression doesn’t clear up until things get easier. Frank explains that once he finishes a project and is assigned something else, his depression clears up (unless the new project is just as bad); or sometimes, through much struggle, he figure out how to make the project bearable, and that resolves the depression as well.
Frank is genuine in expressing his feelings, and correct about work problems being correlated with his depression, but he is wrong about causation between the two.
Do you find this story analogous to your situation? If not, why not?
I find it hard to believe. But maybe I’ve always been depressed and that’s why I’ve suffered from them so badly.