I should say, these shifts have not been anything like an unmitigated failure, and I don’t now believe were worth it just because they caused me to be more socially connected to x-risk things.
Had a little trouble parsing this, especially the second half. Here’s my attempted paraphrase:
I take you to be saying that: 1) the shifts that resulted from engaging with x-risk were not all bad, despite leading to the disorienting events listed above, and 2) in particular, you think the shifts were (partially) beneficial for reasons other than just that they led you to be more socially connected to x-risk people.
Engaging with CFAR and LW’s ideas about redesigning my mind and focusing on important goals for humanity (e.g. x-risk reduction), has primarily—not partially—majorly improved my general competence, and how meaningful my life is. I’m a much better person, more honest and true, because of it. It directly made my life better, not just my abstract beliefs about the future.
The difficulties above were transitional problems, not the main effects.
Hm, what caused them? I’m not sure exactly, but I will riff on it for a bit anyway.
Why was I uninterested in hanging out with most people? There was something I cared about quite deeply, and it felt feasible that I could get it, but it seemed transparent that these people couldn’t recognise it or help me get it and I was just humouring them to pretend otherwise. I felt kinda lost at sea, and so trying to understand and really integrate others’ worldviews when my own felt unstable was… it felt like failure. Nowadays I feel stable in my ability to think and figure out what I believe about the world, and so I’m able to use other people as valuable hypothesis generation, and play with ideas together safely. I feel comfortable adding ideas to my wheelhouse that aren’t perfectly vetted, because I trust overall I’m heading in a good direction and will be able to recognise their issues later.
I think that giving friends a life-presentation and then later noticing a clear hole in it felt really good, it felt like thinking for myself, putting in work, and getting out some real self-knowledge about my own cognitive processes. I think that gave me more confidence to interact with others’ ideas and yet trust I’d stay on the right track. I think writing my ideas down into blogposts also helped a lot with this.
Generally building up an understanding of the world that seemed to actually be right, and work for making stuff, and people I respected trusted, helped a lot.
That’s what I got right now.
Oh, there was another key thing tied up with the above: feeling like I was in control of my future. I was terrible at being a ‘good student’, yet I thought that my career depended on doing well at university. This lead to a lot of motivated reasoning and a perpetual fear that made it hard to explore, and gave me a lot of tunnel vision throughout my life at the time. Only when I realised I could get work that didn’t rely on good grades at university, but instead on trust I had built in the rationality and EA networks, and I could do things I cared about like work on LessWrong, did I feel more relaxed about considering exploring other big changes I wanted in how I lived my life, and doing things I enjoyed.
A lot of these worries felt like I was waiting to fix a problem—a problem whose solution I could reach, at least in principle—and then the worry would go away. This is why I said ‘transitional’. I felt like the problems could be overcome.
Had a little trouble parsing this, especially the second half. Here’s my attempted paraphrase:
I take you to be saying that: 1) the shifts that resulted from engaging with x-risk were not all bad, despite leading to the disorienting events listed above, and 2) in particular, you think the shifts were (partially) beneficial for reasons other than just that they led you to be more socially connected to x-risk people.
Is that right?
That’s close.
Engaging with CFAR and LW’s ideas about redesigning my mind and focusing on important goals for humanity (e.g. x-risk reduction), has primarily—not partially—majorly improved my general competence, and how meaningful my life is. I’m a much better person, more honest and true, because of it. It directly made my life better, not just my abstract beliefs about the future.
The difficulties above were transitional problems, not the main effects.
Why do you say they were “transitional”? Do you have a notion of what exactly caused them?
Hm, what caused them? I’m not sure exactly, but I will riff on it for a bit anyway.
Why was I uninterested in hanging out with most people? There was something I cared about quite deeply, and it felt feasible that I could get it, but it seemed transparent that these people couldn’t recognise it or help me get it and I was just humouring them to pretend otherwise. I felt kinda lost at sea, and so trying to understand and really integrate others’ worldviews when my own felt unstable was… it felt like failure. Nowadays I feel stable in my ability to think and figure out what I believe about the world, and so I’m able to use other people as valuable hypothesis generation, and play with ideas together safely. I feel comfortable adding ideas to my wheelhouse that aren’t perfectly vetted, because I trust overall I’m heading in a good direction and will be able to recognise their issues later.
I think that giving friends a life-presentation and then later noticing a clear hole in it felt really good, it felt like thinking for myself, putting in work, and getting out some real self-knowledge about my own cognitive processes. I think that gave me more confidence to interact with others’ ideas and yet trust I’d stay on the right track. I think writing my ideas down into blogposts also helped a lot with this.
Generally building up an understanding of the world that seemed to actually be right, and work for making stuff, and people I respected trusted, helped a lot.
That’s what I got right now.
Oh, there was another key thing tied up with the above: feeling like I was in control of my future. I was terrible at being a ‘good student’, yet I thought that my career depended on doing well at university. This lead to a lot of motivated reasoning and a perpetual fear that made it hard to explore, and gave me a lot of tunnel vision throughout my life at the time. Only when I realised I could get work that didn’t rely on good grades at university, but instead on trust I had built in the rationality and EA networks, and I could do things I cared about like work on LessWrong, did I feel more relaxed about considering exploring other big changes I wanted in how I lived my life, and doing things I enjoyed.
A lot of these worries felt like I was waiting to fix a problem—a problem whose solution I could reach, at least in principle—and then the worry would go away. This is why I said ‘transitional’. I felt like the problems could be overcome.