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.
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.