(1) Updating your beliefs and action-patterns as new evidence comes in; deciding to earn money by the method that is actually most likely to be effective (according to the best evidence you know) instead of by your last year’s guess as to how to most effectively earn money, for example.
and
(2) Having your beliefs and action-patterns be in a constant or immobilizing state of flux.
If you’re a good rationalist, and you carefully research topics that matter for your goals, after a while you should in most cases have a fairly stable probability distribution as to what the world is like and how best to achieve your goals. (If you find your model flops first one way, and then another, and then another… your models are overconfident and are based too much on recent data, so you should replace them with a more spread-out probability distribution over how things might be.) This way, you get a stable model you can use to e.g. actually earn more money, and not just go through motions that you at one point thought would earn you more money.
I’ve been listening to high-quality entrepreneurship seminars as I exercise (audiobooks are a great way to get free bonus time), and many of them recommend rationality techniques like making your hypotheses explicit and actively searching for dis-confirming evidence. These are seminars made by and for stereotypical go-getters.
After having read your response to haig, I still have trouble understanding how to avoid his/her “existential angst/analysis paralysis” problem. As you recommend doing, I started trying to understand the universe as a teen, in order to more effectively pursue my interests. This part has always been natural to me. But as I gradually learned during this pursuit—and in large part thinks to this very site—I’m a part of the universe that’s very relevant to me, so I should be trying to model myself accurately.
This makes very much sense and seems to be a common realization among thoughtful humans: If my goal is to become happy (let’s say in a fairly Aristotelian sense of the word), then deciding what sort of person to become in the first place becomes a very important question to answer correctly. Should I be habituating myself to be one of these ‘go-getters’? Or to sitting on top of a mountain and entertaining visitors with mystical-sounding wise-cracks? We’re right to wonder whether people should spend more than five minutes determining what to study at university, or which career to start. This seems even more important—one level of action higher still.
LW offers two partial antidotes to this conundrum: I can rest assured that whatever I do, It’ll be in the pursuit of status within my community. This modest bit of biological determinism is convincing, and actually helps. I’m also convinced that the kind of status-raising activities I pursue should be of the genuine do-gooding variety (that is to say it should follow a consequentialist sort of calculus). But this fall far short of constraining the problem: I feel—and in large part because of the literature I’ve read here at LW—that I’m so able to redesign many of my own desires in the first place. This community has done so much to make me aware that so many of my interests and so much of my self-model are very socially contingent, and because of this so much of my own personality is available for re-design. Such openness of possibilities at such high levels of action really do seem to motivate questions like Haig’s question very strongly. “Who should I be? Which of them will be best?
Haig, there’s a difference between:
(1) Updating your beliefs and action-patterns as new evidence comes in; deciding to earn money by the method that is actually most likely to be effective (according to the best evidence you know) instead of by your last year’s guess as to how to most effectively earn money, for example.
and
(2) Having your beliefs and action-patterns be in a constant or immobilizing state of flux.
If you’re a good rationalist, and you carefully research topics that matter for your goals, after a while you should in most cases have a fairly stable probability distribution as to what the world is like and how best to achieve your goals. (If you find your model flops first one way, and then another, and then another… your models are overconfident and are based too much on recent data, so you should replace them with a more spread-out probability distribution over how things might be.) This way, you get a stable model you can use to e.g. actually earn more money, and not just go through motions that you at one point thought would earn you more money.
I’ve been listening to high-quality entrepreneurship seminars as I exercise (audiobooks are a great way to get free bonus time), and many of them recommend rationality techniques like making your hypotheses explicit and actively searching for dis-confirming evidence. These are seminars made by and for stereotypical go-getters.
Anna,
After having read your response to haig, I still have trouble understanding how to avoid his/her “existential angst/analysis paralysis” problem. As you recommend doing, I started trying to understand the universe as a teen, in order to more effectively pursue my interests. This part has always been natural to me. But as I gradually learned during this pursuit—and in large part thinks to this very site—I’m a part of the universe that’s very relevant to me, so I should be trying to model myself accurately.
This makes very much sense and seems to be a common realization among thoughtful humans: If my goal is to become happy (let’s say in a fairly Aristotelian sense of the word), then deciding what sort of person to become in the first place becomes a very important question to answer correctly. Should I be habituating myself to be one of these ‘go-getters’? Or to sitting on top of a mountain and entertaining visitors with mystical-sounding wise-cracks? We’re right to wonder whether people should spend more than five minutes determining what to study at university, or which career to start. This seems even more important—one level of action higher still.
LW offers two partial antidotes to this conundrum: I can rest assured that whatever I do, It’ll be in the pursuit of status within my community. This modest bit of biological determinism is convincing, and actually helps. I’m also convinced that the kind of status-raising activities I pursue should be of the genuine do-gooding variety (that is to say it should follow a consequentialist sort of calculus). But this fall far short of constraining the problem: I feel—and in large part because of the literature I’ve read here at LW—that I’m so able to redesign many of my own desires in the first place. This community has done so much to make me aware that so many of my interests and so much of my self-model are very socially contingent, and because of this so much of my own personality is available for re-design. Such openness of possibilities at such high levels of action really do seem to motivate questions like Haig’s question very strongly. “Who should I be? Which of them will be best?