A random stupid thought that occurs to me is that maybe your limbic system might be set to be too trusting of the truths you have “already accepted”, and then maybe something else in your limbic system has been hurt enough to feel like “actions based on beliefs get me hurt” and so it has shut down that whole category of “theoretically motivated actions”?
Naively, two such mechanisms hiding in your limbic system would, together, perhaps create the totality of behavior and mindset that you describe?
There is a sequence of posts on babbling and pruning that is not on LW itself, but seem “worthy of the canon” to me, that you might not have read. (Oh. Apparently they got on LW and here’s the fifth one!)
If we combine the babble & prune frame, plus the hypothesis about what might be in your limbic system, it suggests that maybe your prune submodule got overactive and your babble submodule noticed that it was being totally ignored and lost its enthusiasm… or something?
I could imagine numerous exercises that might change either module on purpose, like “doing some improv where you only say yes and everyone love bombs you for being so good at trying new things” or maybe like “writing on the same prompt, over and over, trying on purpose to be hilariously wronger and worse, but also different, with each rewrite attempt” or maybe like comfort zone expansion?
The key larger point I’m trying to make “from outside local canon” is that maybe your pruning and babbling were basically correctly allocated less brain/time/effort resources!
Maybe (not necessarily, but just “maybe”) you somehow weren’t good enough (in your old contexts, at your past development levels) at either of those techniques to usefully expand skills in either of them in a safe way!
If you just go meta, and use “systematic willpower” to overrule what your limbic system may have done by default, then you might just stumble straight into the valley of bad rationality? Maybe!
So I would say to maybe “try babbling and pruning on paper about safely and reversibly doing improv”.
Then maybe try doing improv about hilarious unsafe and irreversible ways to do comfort zone expansion?
And then perhapsconsult your parents on doing one tiny small real (potentially irreversible) comfort zone expansion expansion exercise?
(Or maybe skip all this nerd bullshit, and go get a job doing door-to-door sales for two months until your sales numbers are the highest, and then quit! Because maybe “the world is on fire and we should be speed-running our way to a win condition instead of tiptoeing around like a bunch of fucking nerds.” (Synthesized speedrunning suggestion: do the writing exercise today, the improv exercise tomorrow, talk to your parents on day 3, and then find and say yes to a crappy temporary just-for-learning sales job on day 4.))
I haven’t yet read the posts you suggest, but your answer seems really convincing. I guess ‘knowing stuff’, ‘sitting there doing nothing but reading popular science books’, were more rewarded than ‘actually being smart/actually taking the risk of possibly being wrong’, so I did mostly the former, at least as a child and young student. And, weird as it sounds, I guess my first years of uni did the same thing: what was really rewarded then was knowing as many cool examples to put in an essay as possible, while ‘rationality’, ‘scientific evidence’, etc. were kind of discouraged. Looking back at it, I see that there was some pruning in my interests, in the kind of books I’d read, etc. Might have been a similar pruning of what my brain lets me do, for all I know. Seems really odd, as it would mean I’ve been sort of traumatized by my early college years? But consistent with what I’ve sometimes been ranting about. Will look into all of that.
Thanks a lot for your very interesting comment, by the way!
A random stupid thought that occurs to me is that maybe your limbic system might be set to be too trusting of the truths you have “already accepted”, and then maybe something else in your limbic system has been hurt enough to feel like “actions based on beliefs get me hurt” and so it has shut down that whole category of “theoretically motivated actions”?
Naively, two such mechanisms hiding in your limbic system would, together, perhaps create the totality of behavior and mindset that you describe?
There is a sequence of posts on babbling and pruning that is not on LW itself, but seem “worthy of the canon” to me, that you might not have read. (Oh. Apparently they got on LW and here’s the fifth one!)
If we combine the babble & prune frame, plus the hypothesis about what might be in your limbic system, it suggests that maybe your prune submodule got overactive and your babble submodule noticed that it was being totally ignored and lost its enthusiasm… or something?
I could imagine numerous exercises that might change either module on purpose, like “doing some improv where you only say yes and everyone love bombs you for being so good at trying new things” or maybe like “writing on the same prompt, over and over, trying on purpose to be hilariously wronger and worse, but also different, with each rewrite attempt” or maybe like comfort zone expansion?
Separately, with much much much less support from the local canon, I tend to be really big on safety engineering, and watching out for reversibility (which is a deep deep deep principal that motivates bayes, though sometimes in bayesian contexts “the same math” is referred to as a “consistency” criterion rather than a “reversibility” criterion).
The key larger point I’m trying to make “from outside local canon” is that maybe your pruning and babbling were basically correctly allocated less brain/time/effort resources!
Maybe (not necessarily, but just “maybe”) you somehow weren’t good enough (in your old contexts, at your past development levels) at either of those techniques to usefully expand skills in either of them in a safe way!
If you just go meta, and use “systematic willpower” to overrule what your limbic system may have done by default, then you might just stumble straight into the valley of bad rationality? Maybe!
So I would say to maybe “try babbling and pruning on paper about safely and reversibly doing improv”.
Then maybe try doing improv about hilarious unsafe and irreversible ways to do comfort zone expansion?
And then perhaps consult your parents on doing one tiny small real (potentially irreversible) comfort zone expansion expansion exercise?
(Or maybe skip all this nerd bullshit, and go get a job doing door-to-door sales for two months until your sales numbers are the highest, and then quit! Because maybe “the world is on fire and we should be speed-running our way to a win condition instead of tiptoeing around like a bunch of fucking nerds.” (Synthesized speedrunning suggestion: do the writing exercise today, the improv exercise tomorrow, talk to your parents on day 3, and then find and say yes to a crappy temporary just-for-learning sales job on day 4.))
I haven’t yet read the posts you suggest, but your answer seems really convincing. I guess ‘knowing stuff’, ‘sitting there doing nothing but reading popular science books’, were more rewarded than ‘actually being smart/actually taking the risk of possibly being wrong’, so I did mostly the former, at least as a child and young student. And, weird as it sounds, I guess my first years of uni did the same thing: what was really rewarded then was knowing as many cool examples to put in an essay as possible, while ‘rationality’, ‘scientific evidence’, etc. were kind of discouraged. Looking back at it, I see that there was some pruning in my interests, in the kind of books I’d read, etc. Might have been a similar pruning of what my brain lets me do, for all I know. Seems really odd, as it would mean I’ve been sort of traumatized by my early college years? But consistent with what I’ve sometimes been ranting about. Will look into all of that.
Thanks a lot for your very interesting comment, by the way!