The expectations you do not know you have control your happiness more than you know. High expectations that you currently have don’t look like high expectations from the inside, they just look like how the world is/would be.
But “lower your expectations” can often be almost useless advice, kind of like “do the right thing”.
Trying to incorporate “lower expectations” often amounts to “be sad”. How low should you go? It’s not clear at all if you’re using territory-free un-asymmetric simple rules like “lower”. Like any other attempt at truth-finding, it is not magic. It requires thermodynamic work.
The thing is, the payoff is rather amazing. You can just get down to work. As soon as you’re free of a constant stream of abuse from beliefs previously housed in your head, you can Choose without Suffering.
The problem is, I’m not sure how to strategically go about doing this, other than using my full brain with Constant Vigilance.
Coda:
A large portion of the LW project (or at least, more than a few offshoots) is about noticing you have beliefs that respond to incentives other than pure epistemic ones, and trying not to reload when shooting your foot off with those.
So unsurprisingly, there’s a failure mode here: when you publicly declare really low expectations (eg “everyone’s an asshole”), it works to challenge people, urges them to prove you wrong. It’s a cool trick to win games of Chicken but as usual, it works by handicapping you. So make sure you at least understand the costs and the contexts it works in.
The expectations you do not know you have control your happiness more than you know. High expectations that you currently have don’t look like high expectations from the inside, they just look like how the world is/would be.
But “lower your expectations” can often be almost useless advice, kind of like “do the right thing”.
Trying to incorporate “lower expectations” often amounts to “be sad”. How low should you go? It’s not clear at all if you’re using territory-free un-asymmetric simple rules like “lower”. Like any other attempt at truth-finding, it is not magic. It requires thermodynamic work.
The thing is, the payoff is rather amazing. You can just get down to work. As soon as you’re free of a constant stream of abuse from beliefs previously housed in your head, you can Choose without Suffering.
The problem is, I’m not sure how to strategically go about doing this, other than using my full brain with Constant Vigilance.
Coda: A large portion of the LW project (or at least, more than a few offshoots) is about noticing you have beliefs that respond to incentives other than pure epistemic ones, and trying not to reload when shooting your foot off with those. So unsurprisingly, there’s a failure mode here: when you publicly declare really low expectations (eg “everyone’s an asshole”), it works to challenge people, urges them to prove you wrong. It’s a cool trick to win games of Chicken but as usual, it works by handicapping you. So make sure you at least understand the costs and the contexts it works in.