You seem to be taking it as a given that failure reflects on you. This represents a tremendous toll on mental energy, and it’s the very first type of belief that I train people to get rid of in order to stop procrastinating and increase their throughput.
If you’re worried about whether something is an excuse for failure, in other words, you’re already thinking too much about failure for your own good.
See Seligman (optimist/pessimist thinking) and Dweck (fixed/growth mindsets) for why… in particular, note that their experimentally validated models of successful and struggling people’s thought processes blow away your model of what “extenuating circumstances” to consider.
Optimists and “Growth”-minded individuals have no problem using extenuating circumstances to explain the past, since the past is already over and not subject to modification. Their focus is on what they learned about what they should do in the future. But this isn’t “excusing” anything, because they’re not under the mistaken impression that failure actually reflects on them.
When I consider doing less, I consider that this would make me a horrible awful unforgivable person. And then I cheerfully shake hands with others who aren’t trying at all to save the world.
This is pretty much a standard thought pattern that crops up in treating people with the “fixed” mindset; you can find plenty of examples in the dialogues of Robert Fritz’s books, where he uses logic to debunk the idea that a person needs to justify their existence by saving the world… or doing anything worthwhile at all. I used similar methods to get rid of my compulsions along those lines.
Note that it is entirely possible to want to save the world because it makes you feel good, not because the lack of that effort will make you a terrible awful person. I still have my own world-saving mission, though I went through a rather confusing period where I still associated that ideal with the negative compulsions that previously drove it. Took a while to realize I could have the positives of the mission, without needing to make it “serious” in the self-righteous way that I did before.
You seem to be taking it as a given that failure reflects on you. This represents a tremendous toll on mental energy, and it’s the very first type of belief that I train people to get rid of in order to stop procrastinating and increase their throughput.
I’ve taken a different route. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking that failure reflects on me. It doesn’t take a tremendous toll on mental energy because I don’t expect it to. I have simply embraced the Competitive Conspiracy’s line on this sort of thing, and rejected the meme of this world which says that we are soft and fragile creatures who must be terribly careful never to poke ourselves for fear of ending up (GASP!) unhappy.
I am a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that.
I have set myself a task, and if I cannot do it, then that means I am not the person I believe myself to be, which makes it a test of my existence.
But, Eliezer… your route doesn’t work as well as you want it to. You have mentioned several times here that mental energy is a large problem for you. Pjeby has referenced Seligman and Dweck on how common your experience is for those taking routes close to yours… and your response is to elaborate your current route.
You say “I am a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that”, but Seligman has done a lot of fairly careful research into how that works for others, and has found that there is usually something “wrong with that”, for most of the people he studied. It’s possible that you’re different from the bulk of Seligman’s research subjects. Possible.
I may have missed something between the lines (this is a fuzzy pattern matching result)… but I think you just decided not to read up on Seligman and Dweck, and instead defended your current behaviour.
Is it worth trying something different?
PS: I’m not contradicting the obvious evidence that you’re actually a highly effective person, but your own complaint is that you often feel that you’re not effective enough.
Mental energy is (so far as I can tell) a large problem for everyone who spends a lot of time thinking. The fact that it’s a problem for Eliezer isn’t evidence that he’s doing anything wrong. If it’s more of a problem for Eliezer than for other people like him—ideally for someone exactly like him except for not thinking that failure reflects on oneself, but presumably no such person is available for comparison—then there’s evidence of a problem.
I dare say Eliezer would do well to investigate the possibility that he could be more effective by changing his attitudes. On the other hand, he would also do well to consider the possibility that those attitudes are part of what makes him effective in ways he is satisfied with. It’s not as if perfectionism obviously never has any useful consequences.
One of the really big problems I’ve found with talking about mental issues is that existing psychological terminology (both of the formal and informal kinds) is way too imprecise to have a useful function.
For example, many words have completely different meanings depending on whether you operate from a fixed or growth mindset. In the growth mindset, “perfectionism” means always striving to improve yourself, no matter how good you already are. But in the fixed mindset, perfectionism means never being good enough.
Despite the superficially-similar-sounding definitions, the way these two “algorithms feel from the inside” is radically different, with correspondingly large differences on mental and physical performance.
Only Eliezer can know for sure which algorithm he’s using… but generally speaking, people with a growth mindset aren’t worried about whether something lets them off the hook, nor considering themselves awful people if they don’t succeed. Those sound like fixed-mindset traits to me.
But in the fixed mindset, perfectionism means never being good enough.
That’s the usual definition of “perfectionism,” though I’m not sure Eliezer is using the word the same way. The word seems out of place in the growth mindset.
I’m going to disagree with the grandparent here: perfectionism obviously never has any useful consequences.
The word seems out of place in the growth mindset.
shrug. If you look, you can find growth-minded people who nonetheless describe themselves as perfectionists. It’s just that they mean it the other way, i.e., that they desire and strive for perfection, rather than feeling they have to be perfect before they can consider themselves acceptable.
Well… we clearly have different models of how most people work, then. People fail to achieve their full potential for not challenging themselves. PJEby thinks that this is due to the fear of failure leading to unhappiness and lack of self-worth, so he tries to convince people that failing is all right and doesn’t make them an awful person. I worry that this means they won’t try hard enough. It doesn’t even ring true, to me.
So I take the route of—it’s okay to take on even those challenges that provide you with genuine information about yourself, and that may even provide you with negative information. Being told that you aren’t as good as you thought is, itself, not the end of the world. Being a little unhappy now and then isn’t the end of the world. It’s okay to throw all of yourself against a challenge. And it’s okay not to make your excuses in advance—though your temptation to do so may tell you where you need improvement.
In the Matrix of the inside of your mind, you are not always strong where you believe you are strong, but you are weak where you believe you are weak. PJEby tells you that failure doesn’t have to hurt. To me this seems to amount to telling people that they are weak and cannot withstand hurt; that their mental landscape has to be smoothed out into a world where nothing bad ever happens, and so they can dare anything. But what else does that smoothing lose? How much strength is that really?
I won three AI-Box experiments, then lost two. I threw all of myself into winning, and I still lost. It hurt. I survived.
Losing the stakes of yourself that you gambled—that hurts and it’s okay for it to hurt, but even that is not the end of the world. You keep moving forward, afterward.
(Of course, on some occasions it IS the end of the world.)
I worry that this means they won’t try hard enough.
So did I. So do they. And we’re all right: They don’t “try hard enough”.
They stop trying and start doing, instead. Moves things along much faster, I must say. ;-)
PJEby tells you that failure doesn’t have to hurt. To me this seems to amount to telling people that they are weak and cannot withstand hurt
Okay, now this is where you have the poor model of me. See e.g. Fritz on affirmations, and Dweck on mindsets. Failure is something to embrace and learn from… not to be avoided.
Losing the stakes of yourself that you gambled—that hurts and it’s okay for it to hurt, but even that is not the end of the world. You keep moving forward, afterward.
This is where we agree.… and also where you sound more like you’re in the “growth” mindset.
The trouble is, a person in the “growth” mindset can take a “no pain, no gain” stance and have it motivate them. A fixed-mindset person cannot, because they see failure as a permanent reflection on their character… which leads to paralysis.
I group most self-help gurus into two categories: Hardassians (“no pain, no gain”) and Fairylanders (“think happy thoughts and it will all turn out”). In your above comment, you’re speaking like a Hardassian who’s mistaken me for a Fairylander. Thing is, both the Hardassian and Fairylander strategies work fine for people in the growth mindset, and not at all for people in the fixed mindset. As someone else said:
I think PJEby is on target for most people to the extent that most people do not resemble Eliezer.
...because most people (at least most intellectuals AFAICT) do not operate out of the “growth” mindset, and therefore find fear of failure paralyzing, rather than stimulating.
I don’t teach people to avoid pain, I teach them to remove their pain-avoidance compulsions, so that pain doesn’t bother them any more, and they have no need to avoid it.
And there’s a huge difference between that, and what you’re saying I do.
I endorse PJEby on focusing attention on growth potential, the psychological literature seems to put some weight behind this view. Focusing your attention (and thus modifying your emotional reactions and mental energy) doesn’t have to involve self-deception about your ability to grow.
Maybe the difference there is that you’ve started on the right foot in life. The very first tries, you gave it your all, and succeeded enough to see that more could be achieved, and so went spiraling on, upwards. For some people, the contrary may hold true. In their case, it may make sense to negate further blows to their ego and self confidence, because they’re already hurt and weakened. You, on the other hand, are on the move, and have been acquiring a lot of momentum along the way.
So people who didn’t start well, maybe need to pause, and restart, slowly but surely, building up their own momentum, doing it right this time, and forgetting as fast and thoroughly about their past failures as they can.
On another point, sometimes it may make sense to decentralize some of your tasks on other people, who are better able to do them for you. Not too much, since otherwise you may end up not doing anything by yourself anymore, but not too little, or else, you end up doing too much by yourself, including tasks that you aren’t good at, tasks for which you must invest a lot more mental energy than someone else would. In that case, it makes sense to trade your help, in a domain where you can efficiently, effortlessly use your energy, for the help of someone else in a domain where they are efficient and you not.
For some people, the contrary may hold true. In their case, it may make sense to negate further blows to their ego and self confidence, because they’re already hurt and weakened. (...) So people who didn’t start well, maybe need to pause, and restart, slowly but surely, building up their own momentum, doing it right this time, and forgetting as fast and thoroughly about their past failures as they can.
And the critical point here, that I’m not sure Eliezer realizes, is that you are probably describing the majority of people.
So people who didn’t start well, maybe need to pause, and restart, slowly but surely, building up their own momentum, doing it right this time, and forgetting as fast and thoroughly about their past failures as they can.
Yes. One of the most important things to teach people is that they can actually succeed at something—anything.
Examples:
a friend who teaches music to poor kids at a sink school. He shows up with a mohawk and teaches them how to make good noise. The light in their eyes is so rewarding he puts up with the stifling bureaucracy.
student newspapers, which to a large extent exist to be written rather than to be read.
sports clubs for kids, even.
Teaching people what success feels like is really important. Really, really important.
Except that most people talk about saving the world metaphorically, so it helps to bring them back to the reality of relatively low stakes. It really isn’t that bad to fail.
You seem to be taking it as a given that failure reflects on you. This represents a tremendous toll on mental energy, and it’s the very first type of belief that I train people to get rid of in order to stop procrastinating and increase their throughput.
If you’re worried about whether something is an excuse for failure, in other words, you’re already thinking too much about failure for your own good.
See Seligman (optimist/pessimist thinking) and Dweck (fixed/growth mindsets) for why… in particular, note that their experimentally validated models of successful and struggling people’s thought processes blow away your model of what “extenuating circumstances” to consider.
Optimists and “Growth”-minded individuals have no problem using extenuating circumstances to explain the past, since the past is already over and not subject to modification. Their focus is on what they learned about what they should do in the future. But this isn’t “excusing” anything, because they’re not under the mistaken impression that failure actually reflects on them.
This is pretty much a standard thought pattern that crops up in treating people with the “fixed” mindset; you can find plenty of examples in the dialogues of Robert Fritz’s books, where he uses logic to debunk the idea that a person needs to justify their existence by saving the world… or doing anything worthwhile at all. I used similar methods to get rid of my compulsions along those lines.
Note that it is entirely possible to want to save the world because it makes you feel good, not because the lack of that effort will make you a terrible awful person. I still have my own world-saving mission, though I went through a rather confusing period where I still associated that ideal with the negative compulsions that previously drove it. Took a while to realize I could have the positives of the mission, without needing to make it “serious” in the self-righteous way that I did before.
I’ve taken a different route. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking that failure reflects on me. It doesn’t take a tremendous toll on mental energy because I don’t expect it to. I have simply embraced the Competitive Conspiracy’s line on this sort of thing, and rejected the meme of this world which says that we are soft and fragile creatures who must be terribly careful never to poke ourselves for fear of ending up (GASP!) unhappy.
I am a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that.
I have set myself a task, and if I cannot do it, then that means I am not the person I believe myself to be, which makes it a test of my existence.
And that’s fine.
But, Eliezer… your route doesn’t work as well as you want it to. You have mentioned several times here that mental energy is a large problem for you. Pjeby has referenced Seligman and Dweck on how common your experience is for those taking routes close to yours… and your response is to elaborate your current route.
You say “I am a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that”, but Seligman has done a lot of fairly careful research into how that works for others, and has found that there is usually something “wrong with that”, for most of the people he studied. It’s possible that you’re different from the bulk of Seligman’s research subjects. Possible.
I may have missed something between the lines (this is a fuzzy pattern matching result)… but I think you just decided not to read up on Seligman and Dweck, and instead defended your current behaviour.
Is it worth trying something different?
PS: I’m not contradicting the obvious evidence that you’re actually a highly effective person, but your own complaint is that you often feel that you’re not effective enough.
Mental energy is (so far as I can tell) a large problem for everyone who spends a lot of time thinking. The fact that it’s a problem for Eliezer isn’t evidence that he’s doing anything wrong. If it’s more of a problem for Eliezer than for other people like him—ideally for someone exactly like him except for not thinking that failure reflects on oneself, but presumably no such person is available for comparison—then there’s evidence of a problem.
I dare say Eliezer would do well to investigate the possibility that he could be more effective by changing his attitudes. On the other hand, he would also do well to consider the possibility that those attitudes are part of what makes him effective in ways he is satisfied with. It’s not as if perfectionism obviously never has any useful consequences.
One of the really big problems I’ve found with talking about mental issues is that existing psychological terminology (both of the formal and informal kinds) is way too imprecise to have a useful function.
For example, many words have completely different meanings depending on whether you operate from a fixed or growth mindset. In the growth mindset, “perfectionism” means always striving to improve yourself, no matter how good you already are. But in the fixed mindset, perfectionism means never being good enough.
Despite the superficially-similar-sounding definitions, the way these two “algorithms feel from the inside” is radically different, with correspondingly large differences on mental and physical performance.
Only Eliezer can know for sure which algorithm he’s using… but generally speaking, people with a growth mindset aren’t worried about whether something lets them off the hook, nor considering themselves awful people if they don’t succeed. Those sound like fixed-mindset traits to me.
That’s the usual definition of “perfectionism,” though I’m not sure Eliezer is using the word the same way. The word seems out of place in the growth mindset.
I’m going to disagree with the grandparent here: perfectionism obviously never has any useful consequences.
shrug. If you look, you can find growth-minded people who nonetheless describe themselves as perfectionists. It’s just that they mean it the other way, i.e., that they desire and strive for perfection, rather than feeling they have to be perfect before they can consider themselves acceptable.
I suspect that if others tried to follow you down this road, most would fail to achieve their full potential due to crushing failure of self-worth.
Well… we clearly have different models of how most people work, then. People fail to achieve their full potential for not challenging themselves. PJEby thinks that this is due to the fear of failure leading to unhappiness and lack of self-worth, so he tries to convince people that failing is all right and doesn’t make them an awful person. I worry that this means they won’t try hard enough. It doesn’t even ring true, to me.
So I take the route of—it’s okay to take on even those challenges that provide you with genuine information about yourself, and that may even provide you with negative information. Being told that you aren’t as good as you thought is, itself, not the end of the world. Being a little unhappy now and then isn’t the end of the world. It’s okay to throw all of yourself against a challenge. And it’s okay not to make your excuses in advance—though your temptation to do so may tell you where you need improvement.
In the Matrix of the inside of your mind, you are not always strong where you believe you are strong, but you are weak where you believe you are weak. PJEby tells you that failure doesn’t have to hurt. To me this seems to amount to telling people that they are weak and cannot withstand hurt; that their mental landscape has to be smoothed out into a world where nothing bad ever happens, and so they can dare anything. But what else does that smoothing lose? How much strength is that really?
I won three AI-Box experiments, then lost two. I threw all of myself into winning, and I still lost. It hurt. I survived.
Losing the stakes of yourself that you gambled—that hurts and it’s okay for it to hurt, but even that is not the end of the world. You keep moving forward, afterward.
(Of course, on some occasions it IS the end of the world.)
So did I. So do they. And we’re all right: They don’t “try hard enough”.
They stop trying and start doing, instead. Moves things along much faster, I must say. ;-)
Okay, now this is where you have the poor model of me. See e.g. Fritz on affirmations, and Dweck on mindsets. Failure is something to embrace and learn from… not to be avoided.
This is where we agree.… and also where you sound more like you’re in the “growth” mindset.
The trouble is, a person in the “growth” mindset can take a “no pain, no gain” stance and have it motivate them. A fixed-mindset person cannot, because they see failure as a permanent reflection on their character… which leads to paralysis.
I group most self-help gurus into two categories: Hardassians (“no pain, no gain”) and Fairylanders (“think happy thoughts and it will all turn out”). In your above comment, you’re speaking like a Hardassian who’s mistaken me for a Fairylander. Thing is, both the Hardassian and Fairylander strategies work fine for people in the growth mindset, and not at all for people in the fixed mindset. As someone else said:
...because most people (at least most intellectuals AFAICT) do not operate out of the “growth” mindset, and therefore find fear of failure paralyzing, rather than stimulating.
I don’t teach people to avoid pain, I teach them to remove their pain-avoidance compulsions, so that pain doesn’t bother them any more, and they have no need to avoid it.
And there’s a huge difference between that, and what you’re saying I do.
I endorse PJEby on focusing attention on growth potential, the psychological literature seems to put some weight behind this view. Focusing your attention (and thus modifying your emotional reactions and mental energy) doesn’t have to involve self-deception about your ability to grow.
Anecdotal observation: the mindset Eliezer describes seems, in my experience, to be correlated with an individual’s autodidactic tendencies.
That is to say, I think PJEby is on target for most people to the extent that most people do not resemble Eliezer.
Maybe the difference there is that you’ve started on the right foot in life. The very first tries, you gave it your all, and succeeded enough to see that more could be achieved, and so went spiraling on, upwards. For some people, the contrary may hold true. In their case, it may make sense to negate further blows to their ego and self confidence, because they’re already hurt and weakened. You, on the other hand, are on the move, and have been acquiring a lot of momentum along the way.
So people who didn’t start well, maybe need to pause, and restart, slowly but surely, building up their own momentum, doing it right this time, and forgetting as fast and thoroughly about their past failures as they can.
On another point, sometimes it may make sense to decentralize some of your tasks on other people, who are better able to do them for you. Not too much, since otherwise you may end up not doing anything by yourself anymore, but not too little, or else, you end up doing too much by yourself, including tasks that you aren’t good at, tasks for which you must invest a lot more mental energy than someone else would. In that case, it makes sense to trade your help, in a domain where you can efficiently, effortlessly use your energy, for the help of someone else in a domain where they are efficient and you not.
And the critical point here, that I’m not sure Eliezer realizes, is that you are probably describing the majority of people.
Yes. One of the most important things to teach people is that they can actually succeed at something—anything.
Examples:
a friend who teaches music to poor kids at a sink school. He shows up with a mohawk and teaches them how to make good noise. The light in their eyes is so rewarding he puts up with the stifling bureaucracy.
student newspapers, which to a large extent exist to be written rather than to be read.
sports clubs for kids, even.
Teaching people what success feels like is really important. Really, really important.
Downvoted for ignoring PJEby’s well though out reply on an important point.
Except that most people talk about saving the world metaphorically, so it helps to bring them back to the reality of relatively low stakes. It really isn’t that bad to fail.