I find myself wanting to fight with this post. I just spent a lot of effort trying to just do good things and not lotus eat too much, and I’m in a place where I’m on the edge of deciding to just change stories and maybe let mine end the way everyone else’s do—getting old, living well, and then dying despite it all; or perhaps dying young of a doomsday device—if the rest of the transhumanists can’t pick up the slack.
(For those for whom I need to constantly track my need to give signals of continuing effort, I haven’t given up, this isn’t anything we haven’t talked about.)
I don’t know what I want, and to my tired intuition, having just spent a long time trying to save the lotus for later (I say knowing I’m feeling sort of reactive and burned by reading this despite maybe it being intended to avoid making me feel that way), it feels like a call to action to just put the lotus down and work for another 20 years—not that long, says the call to action! - and then you can rest and be comfortable.
And dammit, I want to rest now, I want to just be happy now, I want to be able to think about what kind of open world video game I’d really like to design, I want to learn the parts of social skills that don’t matter professionally, I want to learn how to be really good friends.
And I guess I’ll probably still want to work towards actual success, but it feels like my true values were always the short term ones anyway, and my attempts to think long term were always just trying to get more “short term” rewards later, done through a different brain module than the one that generates motor plans.
I haven’t actually fully given up. I’m still keeping the same grand plans, but they’ve been transformed into a plan that has me doing a lot more making-room-to-lotus-eat. Maybe trying to gain benefit from drives that would be lotus-eating, but not avoiding them very hard. Not trying to work myself as hard as humans can work without losing net productivity.
Anyway, Conor, you’re invited to come hang out at my house, if you’re in berkeley. I have eggnog already, it’s basically my favorite drink, we can have some together.
I resonate strongly with this, and want to do whatever I can to validate/dignify/endorse/support you as you wrestle with this problem. One of the reasons I was hesitant to write the post is that, despite the fact that it’s been a useful handle for me, I didn’t want to lean into the more judgmental side of the concept. For instance, I’ve come around to the belief that no one should ever call someone else’s actions “lotus eating,” because that presumes both that you know exactly what plot that person is trying to stay a part of AND that you know, better than them, what balance keeps them alive and kicking longest.
Too much vibrancy, and your life can become about nothing else, but too little and you can crumple under the weight, choke on the dust, stagger slower and slower until there’s just nowhere you can go, not even back.
I don’t know the answer. If, for instance, we were all 99.95% likely to be doomed in the next five years, I actually don’t know whether it would be better in that case to keep on fighting or to eat all the lotuses. I know that the Luke Skywalkers would keep fighting. But I also know that most of us aren’t that. And in many cases, it’s worse than disastrous to think that you are that and find out you’re wrong. It’s like being handicapped, but not so badly that you can’t rock climb, and discovering the limits of your disability only once you’re dangling from a tiny spur 500 feet up.
I will say that my sense of you leads me to trust you and your judgment. None of us have our heads screwed on completely straight, but I think you’re running processes that will eventually cause you to output the right answers. So if there’s anything actionable in this, for you, it’s … take my reassurance, for whatever it’s worth, that if your systems are outputting “stop trying for a while and just learn what it’s like to be human again” … that’s probably right, and ego te absolvo?
As for “making more room to lotus eat,” I don’t think it is lotus eating, in the case you describe, any more than searching for the perfect gift or running after someone in the rain is lotus eating in a romance. In the thing you describe, you are doing what you’re supposed to do, and those actions aren’t removing you from anything.
Lastly, I can’t take you up on your eggnog offer, as I don’t actually exist, but I did appreciate it, and wished I could say yes.
There is a narrow, natural category that comes to mind from the term lotus-eating and the motivating quote: Something that provides false provision of your needs, saps one’s cognition and skills, and one’s motivation to engage in other activities, rather than invigorates that cognition and skills and motivation and satisfies real needs. Something that doesn’t hijack your reward functions toward things that don’t matter.
That would explain why Lotus-Eating here threatens to ‘take you out of the plot.’ It’s because you stop caring about the plot.
By contrast, spending resources on non-central-plot things that still matter or taking a break are not Lotus-Eating here. Side questing is not Lotus-Eating. Or to think back to wireheading, if the action isn’t at least sort of wireheading, it isn’t Lotus-Eating.
Otherwise, there’s the trap where you think it is morally wrong to help little old ladies across the street because the little old lady isn’t part of the plot and this isn’t efficient. Eliezer raises that example because he felt he needed to explain why he was willing to help little old ladies. And I think that’s fine. It’s a good question in some sense, but if your answer comes back that it’s not just not required but morally bad to do so, because you are some sort of true vitally important hero, I don’t think that type of thinking ends well for anyone.
Note that I can see why someone can think of sex and romance as Lotus-Eating (and wireheading) in the context you’ve mentally placed yourself in, and given the way you claim to be wired. Perhaps avoiding them entirely is right, there certainly are plenty of jobs and traditions that make that trade-off. It’s a massive time sink and potential hijack.
What I worry about in a lot of contexts recently is memes and ideas that tell people that there’s something inherently wrong with Slack, and not doing the maximally helpful thing according to some utility function for the maximum number of people is bad and they should feel bad. I worry that a term that is named to reference a mind-killing supremely addictive opiate (aka something approaching wireheading) but that then gets extended to trying to have a sex life or even to any non-utility-maximizing action will generate the mother of all Motte and Bailey traps. This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people.
Re: “This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people” … I agree, but also think I did about as good of a job as possible of being gentle and supportive and open, and at a certain point the responsibility for not getting pressured into insane optimization or Motte/Bailey traps has to fall on the other person. I like you pointing it out as a caveat, on top of my attempts to nudge people away from that attractor in the OP and in my response to lahwran, but also I don’t think it reaches the point of “this post shouldn’t be made” or “this concept shouldn’t be named what it is.”
(I note that you weren’t making such claims, either. I’m not objecting to Zvi-making-such-a-claim so much as to person-who-might-have-interpreted-Zvi-as-making-that-claim.)
Re: everything else … Yeah. I still haven’t managed to get myself all the way through your Slack post, but I paid some people five bucks to give me summaries and highlights, and as best I can tell, the thing-in-my-ontology that corresponds to what you’re pointing at with Slack is the central discriminator when it comes to self-care via things that threaten to become lotus eating.
If I am experiencing a critical deficit of slack, I turn off my “is this lotus eating?” judgment module. Sometimes I have done this by e.g. putting myself in a sufficiently altered state or location that I just can’t do anything productive, and the part of me that boots up scared halfway through draws reassurance from the assessment of past-me. Something like “ah, I find myself here, unable to do trustworthy cognition, unable to do meaningful work. I will infer from this that a recent past version of me thought it was really important that I chill the fuck out for a bit. So I guess I’m going to just do that now.”
I think the necessity of a post like this comes from a modernity induced category error. We’ve turned play from a virtue into a vice by moloching it into a corner of the optimization space where it just hammers the reward loop as hard as possible without needing to be about anything we care about.
I think your attitude matches mine in many respects. Thanks for the write-up.
One general rule-of-thumb I use to evaluate “break time” activities is to check and ask myself the question, “Is this activity going to linger / have large residual effects on my thoughts after the fact?” ala Malcolm Ocean’s post on centering vs divergent distractions.
I’m still not sure whether sex and romance are entirely lotus eating
If you accept that humans have needs that have to be fulfilled, otherwise the human with unfulfilled needs gradually becomes unhappy and consequently also unproductive, sex at the same time satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction. It may also be a good foundation for long-term cooperation; you essentially condition yourself to feel happy when interacting with given person.
And if you are signed up for cryonics, you hope for the future generations to be smart enough to invent the technology necessary to revive you. For that to happen, smart people today need to reproduce. (And it’s not just about biology, but also about culture. You don’t want all smart people in the future to be deathists, etc.)
Sure, family can take a lot of time and resources. Maybe we should use some brainpower to think about ways how to make it easier. For example, having a rationalist community at some place where having children is less expensive. Sharing child care, doing homeschooling together, etc. Who knows what the children growing up in a rationalist community could become.
I feel like I detect a lot of typical-minding in your (very well-intentioned and kind and thoughtful) comment. I don’t accept that any given individual has particular needs in that arena that must be fulfilled, though I definitely agree that the population as a whole does (and the mean and median and mode humans as well). But just the claim that “sex satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction” is … well, it makes me sad because it’s probably true for you and true for most people, and that makes it worse that it’s false for me.
In general, I suspect that your stance here contains a lot of motivated cognition, specifically because I recall being on the outside of it, looking in, and noting that the strength of the average adult’s faith in such things clearly exceeded the available evidence. There are tons of evolutionary pressures leaning on us, here; it’s unreasonable to expect that our thinking in this arena is not clouded and distorted.
As for projects in raising children through the rationalist community, my primary prediction is that the majority of them will end up deeply screwed up or abandoning the culture of their parents, and that the small number that squeak through and become awesome within this culture will be only about as frequent as the small number that become awesome outside it.
We wouldn’t raise children in an above-baseline way? Why? Why would our culture be so deeply broken that it is unable to do this super important job that has entire forests of low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked? No, we won’t be perfect or anything, and of course our thinking will be massively distorted just like everyone else’s, but why would we fail to even improve on general Western strategies that are obviously deeply sub-optimal and broken?
If we can’t do that better than baseline expectation, honestly what are we even doing here? Our entire artifice doesn’t work. We should admit it, pack up our balls and go home before heading out to try something else. Or to put it another way, if we can’t even raise a child when we put our mind to that, how in heck are we gonna build a friendly AGI? Or do any of the other six impossible things we’d like to do before breakfast?
That doesn’t mean we should do it. You can quite reasonably argue you believe you, or we, have better things to do with our time and effort. I’m not even claiming here that we should do it (and I’m definitely not even thinking that you in particular should do it), although my actually doing it is a reasonably strong revealed preference. What I am claiming is that if you’re saying we couldn’t do it, that we would fail if we tried, then I think it’s vital to dig very deep into that intuition and figure out exactly why you think that.
This is a personal prediction, based on personal judgments about specific people engaged in a specific instantiation of this project. I would be happy to go on for multiple tens of thousands of words about this in private, but I suspect that doing so in public will do nothing but trigger tribalism and status games and defensiveness and all sorts of point-scoring that have nothing to do with anybody’s actual reasons for their beliefs.
Long story short, if you buy that I might actually have important pieces of the map, find me offline.
I will say this much: the bulk of my prediction lies in a model of people in this community responding naively to problems modeled well by the pendulum paradigm.
But even more interestingly, this raises questions of which genres are valid. Or, more precisely, I’ve interrogated my gut sense of what’s lotus eating and what isn’t to draw out information about my deep implicit beliefs surrounding the meaning of life.
This bit really stuck out to me as an awesome example of how to strategically gain insights into your own beliefs and values. When I first got into rationality I did a Halt Melt and Catch Fire, and proceeded to try and reason out and choose what my values “should” be, which resulted in a jumbled mess of contradictions and dissonance.
Your question of asking “What genre do I feel like I’m living in?” leans into the idea that you already have implicit values and beliefs, and encourages you to discover what they are as opposed to telling yourself what they should be.
I find myself wanting to fight with this post. I just spent a lot of effort trying to just do good things and not lotus eat too much, and I’m in a place where I’m on the edge of deciding to just change stories and maybe let mine end the way everyone else’s do—getting old, living well, and then dying despite it all; or perhaps dying young of a doomsday device—if the rest of the transhumanists can’t pick up the slack.
(For those for whom I need to constantly track my need to give signals of continuing effort, I haven’t given up, this isn’t anything we haven’t talked about.)
I don’t know what I want, and to my tired intuition, having just spent a long time trying to save the lotus for later (I say knowing I’m feeling sort of reactive and burned by reading this despite maybe it being intended to avoid making me feel that way), it feels like a call to action to just put the lotus down and work for another 20 years—not that long, says the call to action! - and then you can rest and be comfortable.
And dammit, I want to rest now, I want to just be happy now, I want to be able to think about what kind of open world video game I’d really like to design, I want to learn the parts of social skills that don’t matter professionally, I want to learn how to be really good friends.
And I guess I’ll probably still want to work towards actual success, but it feels like my true values were always the short term ones anyway, and my attempts to think long term were always just trying to get more “short term” rewards later, done through a different brain module than the one that generates motor plans.
I haven’t actually fully given up. I’m still keeping the same grand plans, but they’ve been transformed into a plan that has me doing a lot more making-room-to-lotus-eat. Maybe trying to gain benefit from drives that would be lotus-eating, but not avoiding them very hard. Not trying to work myself as hard as humans can work without losing net productivity.
Anyway, Conor, you’re invited to come hang out at my house, if you’re in berkeley. I have eggnog already, it’s basically my favorite drink, we can have some together.
I resonate strongly with this, and want to do whatever I can to validate/dignify/endorse/support you as you wrestle with this problem. One of the reasons I was hesitant to write the post is that, despite the fact that it’s been a useful handle for me, I didn’t want to lean into the more judgmental side of the concept. For instance, I’ve come around to the belief that no one should ever call someone else’s actions “lotus eating,” because that presumes both that you know exactly what plot that person is trying to stay a part of AND that you know, better than them, what balance keeps them alive and kicking longest.
Too much vibrancy, and your life can become about nothing else, but too little and you can crumple under the weight, choke on the dust, stagger slower and slower until there’s just nowhere you can go, not even back.
I don’t know the answer. If, for instance, we were all 99.95% likely to be doomed in the next five years, I actually don’t know whether it would be better in that case to keep on fighting or to eat all the lotuses. I know that the Luke Skywalkers would keep fighting. But I also know that most of us aren’t that. And in many cases, it’s worse than disastrous to think that you are that and find out you’re wrong. It’s like being handicapped, but not so badly that you can’t rock climb, and discovering the limits of your disability only once you’re dangling from a tiny spur 500 feet up.
I will say that my sense of you leads me to trust you and your judgment. None of us have our heads screwed on completely straight, but I think you’re running processes that will eventually cause you to output the right answers. So if there’s anything actionable in this, for you, it’s … take my reassurance, for whatever it’s worth, that if your systems are outputting “stop trying for a while and just learn what it’s like to be human again” … that’s probably right, and ego te absolvo?
As for “making more room to lotus eat,” I don’t think it is lotus eating, in the case you describe, any more than searching for the perfect gift or running after someone in the rain is lotus eating in a romance. In the thing you describe, you are doing what you’re supposed to do, and those actions aren’t removing you from anything.
Lastly, I can’t take you up on your eggnog offer, as I don’t actually exist, but I did appreciate it, and wished I could say yes.
oh that explains your weird name. seriously basically nobody else has that name
I’m curious who you’re going to turn out to be when you reveal your anonymity
I feel that Nate Soares’s post Rest in Motion is relevant here, and, by extension, my own response to that post.
Your response to it is useful, thank you.
There is a narrow, natural category that comes to mind from the term lotus-eating and the motivating quote: Something that provides false provision of your needs, saps one’s cognition and skills, and one’s motivation to engage in other activities, rather than invigorates that cognition and skills and motivation and satisfies real needs. Something that doesn’t hijack your reward functions toward things that don’t matter.
That would explain why Lotus-Eating here threatens to ‘take you out of the plot.’ It’s because you stop caring about the plot.
By contrast, spending resources on non-central-plot things that still matter or taking a break are not Lotus-Eating here. Side questing is not Lotus-Eating. Or to think back to wireheading, if the action isn’t at least sort of wireheading, it isn’t Lotus-Eating.
Otherwise, there’s the trap where you think it is morally wrong to help little old ladies across the street because the little old lady isn’t part of the plot and this isn’t efficient. Eliezer raises that example because he felt he needed to explain why he was willing to help little old ladies. And I think that’s fine. It’s a good question in some sense, but if your answer comes back that it’s not just not required but morally bad to do so, because you are some sort of true vitally important hero, I don’t think that type of thinking ends well for anyone.
Note that I can see why someone can think of sex and romance as Lotus-Eating (and wireheading) in the context you’ve mentally placed yourself in, and given the way you claim to be wired. Perhaps avoiding them entirely is right, there certainly are plenty of jobs and traditions that make that trade-off. It’s a massive time sink and potential hijack.
What I worry about in a lot of contexts recently is memes and ideas that tell people that there’s something inherently wrong with Slack, and not doing the maximally helpful thing according to some utility function for the maximum number of people is bad and they should feel bad. I worry that a term that is named to reference a mind-killing supremely addictive opiate (aka something approaching wireheading) but that then gets extended to trying to have a sex life or even to any non-utility-maximizing action will generate the mother of all Motte and Bailey traps. This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people.
Re: “This kind of thing is really harmful to a lot of people” … I agree, but also think I did about as good of a job as possible of being gentle and supportive and open, and at a certain point the responsibility for not getting pressured into insane optimization or Motte/Bailey traps has to fall on the other person. I like you pointing it out as a caveat, on top of my attempts to nudge people away from that attractor in the OP and in my response to lahwran, but also I don’t think it reaches the point of “this post shouldn’t be made” or “this concept shouldn’t be named what it is.”
(I note that you weren’t making such claims, either. I’m not objecting to Zvi-making-such-a-claim so much as to person-who-might-have-interpreted-Zvi-as-making-that-claim.)
Re: everything else … Yeah. I still haven’t managed to get myself all the way through your Slack post, but I paid some people five bucks to give me summaries and highlights, and as best I can tell, the thing-in-my-ontology that corresponds to what you’re pointing at with Slack is the central discriminator when it comes to self-care via things that threaten to become lotus eating.
If I am experiencing a critical deficit of slack, I turn off my “is this lotus eating?” judgment module. Sometimes I have done this by e.g. putting myself in a sufficiently altered state or location that I just can’t do anything productive, and the part of me that boots up scared halfway through draws reassurance from the assessment of past-me. Something like “ah, I find myself here, unable to do trustworthy cognition, unable to do meaningful work. I will infer from this that a recent past version of me thought it was really important that I chill the fuck out for a bit. So I guess I’m going to just do that now.”
And this has always been a good move thus far.
I think the necessity of a post like this comes from a modernity induced category error. We’ve turned play from a virtue into a vice by moloching it into a corner of the optimization space where it just hammers the reward loop as hard as possible without needing to be about anything we care about.
I think your attitude matches mine in many respects. Thanks for the write-up.
One general rule-of-thumb I use to evaluate “break time” activities is to check and ask myself the question, “Is this activity going to linger / have large residual effects on my thoughts after the fact?” ala Malcolm Ocean’s post on centering vs divergent distractions.
Nate’s post on resting in motion also seems relevant.
If you accept that humans have needs that have to be fulfilled, otherwise the human with unfulfilled needs gradually becomes unhappy and consequently also unproductive, sex at the same time satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction. It may also be a good foundation for long-term cooperation; you essentially condition yourself to feel happy when interacting with given person.
And if you are signed up for cryonics, you hope for the future generations to be smart enough to invent the technology necessary to revive you. For that to happen, smart people today need to reproduce. (And it’s not just about biology, but also about culture. You don’t want all smart people in the future to be deathists, etc.)
Sure, family can take a lot of time and resources. Maybe we should use some brainpower to think about ways how to make it easier. For example, having a rationalist community at some place where having children is less expensive. Sharing child care, doing homeschooling together, etc. Who knows what the children growing up in a rationalist community could become.
I feel like I detect a lot of typical-minding in your (very well-intentioned and kind and thoughtful) comment. I don’t accept that any given individual has particular needs in that arena that must be fulfilled, though I definitely agree that the population as a whole does (and the mean and median and mode humans as well). But just the claim that “sex satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction” is … well, it makes me sad because it’s probably true for you and true for most people, and that makes it worse that it’s false for me.
In general, I suspect that your stance here contains a lot of motivated cognition, specifically because I recall being on the outside of it, looking in, and noting that the strength of the average adult’s faith in such things clearly exceeded the available evidence. There are tons of evolutionary pressures leaning on us, here; it’s unreasonable to expect that our thinking in this arena is not clouded and distorted.
As for projects in raising children through the rationalist community, my primary prediction is that the majority of them will end up deeply screwed up or abandoning the culture of their parents, and that the small number that squeak through and become awesome within this culture will be only about as frequent as the small number that become awesome outside it.
We wouldn’t raise children in an above-baseline way? Why? Why would our culture be so deeply broken that it is unable to do this super important job that has entire forests of low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked? No, we won’t be perfect or anything, and of course our thinking will be massively distorted just like everyone else’s, but why would we fail to even improve on general Western strategies that are obviously deeply sub-optimal and broken?
If we can’t do that better than baseline expectation, honestly what are we even doing here? Our entire artifice doesn’t work. We should admit it, pack up our balls and go home before heading out to try something else. Or to put it another way, if we can’t even raise a child when we put our mind to that, how in heck are we gonna build a friendly AGI? Or do any of the other six impossible things we’d like to do before breakfast?
That doesn’t mean we should do it. You can quite reasonably argue you believe you, or we, have better things to do with our time and effort. I’m not even claiming here that we should do it (and I’m definitely not even thinking that you in particular should do it), although my actually doing it is a reasonably strong revealed preference. What I am claiming is that if you’re saying we couldn’t do it, that we would fail if we tried, then I think it’s vital to dig very deep into that intuition and figure out exactly why you think that.
This is a personal prediction, based on personal judgments about specific people engaged in a specific instantiation of this project. I would be happy to go on for multiple tens of thousands of words about this in private, but I suspect that doing so in public will do nothing but trigger tribalism and status games and defensiveness and all sorts of point-scoring that have nothing to do with anybody’s actual reasons for their beliefs.
Long story short, if you buy that I might actually have important pieces of the map, find me offline.
I will say this much: the bulk of my prediction lies in a model of people in this community responding naively to problems modeled well by the pendulum paradigm.
This bit really stuck out to me as an awesome example of how to strategically gain insights into your own beliefs and values. When I first got into rationality I did a Halt Melt and Catch Fire, and proceeded to try and reason out and choose what my values “should” be, which resulted in a jumbled mess of contradictions and dissonance.
Your question of asking “What genre do I feel like I’m living in?” leans into the idea that you already have implicit values and beliefs, and encourages you to discover what they are as opposed to telling yourself what they should be.