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.”
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.