I identify strongly with the “Accommodate Yourself”—a substantial fraction of things I figured out with rationality boiled down to realizations of the form “You didn’t have to live like this!” I set up a Schelling point for my glasses so I didn’t have to scramble around looking for them every morning. I got over the inherent virtuousness of cooking my own meals and tried Mealsquares. I got a monitor and mouse for my laptop. The list goes on…
Kierkegaard wrote “So only one lack remains [in our time], even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere.” It seems to me, however, that despite all our progress, life is sufficiently hard as it is. We don’t need to make it any harder than it has to be.
With regards to the thoughts on delayed gratifications, it seems like a valuable reminder that pendulums usually swing a little too far in the other direction. Most people most of the time would benefit from a reminder that the future exists, but some smaller fraction of them also need the reminder that the present exists too.
Thanks for following Hammertime, and I’d love to see more of your writing on here in the future. =)
life is sufficiently hard as it is. We don’t need to make it any harder than it has to be.
It seems like Kierkegaard could distinguish between kinds of difficulties. It feels good to deliberately challenge yourself. It doesn’t feel good to fight to avoid snapping at your partner because you’re hangry because you forgot to go shopping.
Maybe some difficulties are challenges to overcome and some are just friction to avoid.
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. I think mostly the challenges that are good are ones that help create a sense of meaning/broader life satisfaction even if they don’t necessarily increase moment-to-moment happiness. Challenges that don’t feel meaningful are just pointless pain.
Thanks for writing Hammertime and, among other things, providing me with an impetus to actually make a post! (I don’t expect I would have done so otherwise, in part because making a post is sort of an implicit claim that it might be interesting, but the pretext of the final exam provided a nice excuse that let me avoid making that implicit claim...)
I agree that life contains more than enough difficulties for us all. I’m honestly somewhat puzzled as to how Kierkegaard could think it didn’t—hell, things like refrigerators for home use didn’t exist them! Though perhaps he had servants and/or women to perform life-sustaining labor for him.
I think one thing that had prevented me from adopting the “accommodate yourself” mindset very much was a sense that I should be able to just do things, and that certain kinds of needs or limitations were not things it was valid to plan around because it is not acceptable to have them in the first place. (Though of course, those limitations become much more of a problem if you don’t plan around them!) It is in large part the neurodiversity/disability rights rationalist Tumblr cluster that helped me get past a lot of this.
Re: pendulums, when I had first read that in Duncan’s essay I was not convinced that that’s actually how societies work. But now that you mention it, on an individual level I think this model does make a fair amount of sense. I still think it is not quite accurate on the scale of entire societies, though I do think that there tend to be parts of societies that push “too far” on any given change.
I’m not sure I agree that only a smaller number of people need the reminder that the present exists (and matters as much as any future moment)! Maybe I’m typical-minding here or generalizing from a small and unrepresentative sample, but in my experience it seems like most people contain both type of error at once—e.g. in my case, the guilt about staying up late when it was actually a good idea to do so coexisted with a frequent failure to go to bed when staying up was a really bad idea. This is in some sense a system where the two biases keep each other somewhat in check—if you don’t have any other tools for reining in your present-focused bias, a pro-future bias might be better than nothing—but it’s in some ways not a great system as it not only can lead you to make suboptimal decisions sometimes (or push other people into suboptimal future-focused decisions—I think parents often do this) but also often comes with a guilt-driven motivation system which causes all sorts of problems in the long run.
I do agree that the native pro-present bias is generally stronger and usually more dominant in humans’ actual decisionmaking. Just, everyone knows about that already so it didn’t make sense to write about it :)
I identify strongly with the “Accommodate Yourself”—a substantial fraction of things I figured out with rationality boiled down to realizations of the form “You didn’t have to live like this!” I set up a Schelling point for my glasses so I didn’t have to scramble around looking for them every morning. I got over the inherent virtuousness of cooking my own meals and tried Mealsquares. I got a monitor and mouse for my laptop. The list goes on…
Kierkegaard wrote “So only one lack remains [in our time], even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere.” It seems to me, however, that despite all our progress, life is sufficiently hard as it is. We don’t need to make it any harder than it has to be.
With regards to the thoughts on delayed gratifications, it seems like a valuable reminder that pendulums usually swing a little too far in the other direction. Most people most of the time would benefit from a reminder that the future exists, but some smaller fraction of them also need the reminder that the present exists too.
Thanks for following Hammertime, and I’d love to see more of your writing on here in the future. =)
It seems like Kierkegaard could distinguish between kinds of difficulties. It feels good to deliberately challenge yourself. It doesn’t feel good to fight to avoid snapping at your partner because you’re hangry because you forgot to go shopping.
Maybe some difficulties are challenges to overcome and some are just friction to avoid.
Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. I think mostly the challenges that are good are ones that help create a sense of meaning/broader life satisfaction even if they don’t necessarily increase moment-to-moment happiness. Challenges that don’t feel meaningful are just pointless pain.
Thanks for writing Hammertime and, among other things, providing me with an impetus to actually make a post! (I don’t expect I would have done so otherwise, in part because making a post is sort of an implicit claim that it might be interesting, but the pretext of the final exam provided a nice excuse that let me avoid making that implicit claim...)
I agree that life contains more than enough difficulties for us all. I’m honestly somewhat puzzled as to how Kierkegaard could think it didn’t—hell, things like refrigerators for home use didn’t exist them! Though perhaps he had servants and/or women to perform life-sustaining labor for him.
I think one thing that had prevented me from adopting the “accommodate yourself” mindset very much was a sense that I should be able to just do things, and that certain kinds of needs or limitations were not things it was valid to plan around because it is not acceptable to have them in the first place. (Though of course, those limitations become much more of a problem if you don’t plan around them!) It is in large part the neurodiversity/disability rights rationalist Tumblr cluster that helped me get past a lot of this.
Re: pendulums, when I had first read that in Duncan’s essay I was not convinced that that’s actually how societies work. But now that you mention it, on an individual level I think this model does make a fair amount of sense. I still think it is not quite accurate on the scale of entire societies, though I do think that there tend to be parts of societies that push “too far” on any given change.
I’m not sure I agree that only a smaller number of people need the reminder that the present exists (and matters as much as any future moment)! Maybe I’m typical-minding here or generalizing from a small and unrepresentative sample, but in my experience it seems like most people contain both type of error at once—e.g. in my case, the guilt about staying up late when it was actually a good idea to do so coexisted with a frequent failure to go to bed when staying up was a really bad idea. This is in some sense a system where the two biases keep each other somewhat in check—if you don’t have any other tools for reining in your present-focused bias, a pro-future bias might be better than nothing—but it’s in some ways not a great system as it not only can lead you to make suboptimal decisions sometimes (or push other people into suboptimal future-focused decisions—I think parents often do this) but also often comes with a guilt-driven motivation system which causes all sorts of problems in the long run.
I do agree that the native pro-present bias is generally stronger and usually more dominant in humans’ actual decisionmaking. Just, everyone knows about that already so it didn’t make sense to write about it :)