Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.
I’ve been trying to find a satisfying answer to the seeming inverse correlation of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘agency’ (these are very loose labels).
You briefly allude to a potential mechanism for this[1]
You also briefly allude to another mechanism with explanatory power for the inverse[2] - i.e. that while it might seem an individual is highly agentic, they are in fact little more than a host for a highly agentic egregore
I’m engaged in that most quixotic endeavour of actually trying to save the world[3][4], and thus I’m constantly playing with my world model and looking for levers to pull, dominos to push over, that might plausibly -and quickly- shift probability mass towards pleasant timelines.
I think germ theory is exactly the kind of intervention that works here—it’s a simple map that even a child can understand, yet it’s a 100x impact.
I think there’s some kind of ‘germ theory for minds’, and I think we already have all the pieces—we just need to put them together in the right way. I think it’s plausible that this is easy, rapidly scaleable and instrumentally valuable to other efforts in the ‘save the world’ space.
But… I don’t want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive. I need more people trying to change the world, not less. Yet… that scale of ambition seems largely the preserve of people you’d be highly unlikey to describe as ‘enlightened’, ‘balanced’ or ‘well adjusted’; it seems to require a certain amount of delusion to even (want to) try, and benefit from unbalanced schema that are willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of success.
Most of the people who seem to succcessfully change the world are the people I least want to; whereas the people I most want to change the world seem the least likely to.
Since the schools that removed social conditioning and also empowered practitioners to upend the social order, tended to get targeted for destruction. (Or at least so I suspect and some people on Twitter said “yes this did happen” when I speculated this out loud.)
In the Buddhist model of human psychology, we are by default colonized by parasitic thought patterns, though I guess in some cases, like the aforementioned fertility increasing religious memes, they should be thought of as symbiotes with a tradeoff, such as degrading the hosts’ episteme.
Also the world does actually seem to be in rather urgent need of saving; short of a miracle or two it seems like I’m unlikely to live to enjoy my midlife crisis.
Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
But… I don’t want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive.
I think that the likely impact on agency is complicated. One question is the extent to which your current agency is driven by something like pain avoidance.
@Matt Goldenberg has a nice concept of a mode of motivation he calls “the self-loathing monster”, where one effectively motivates themselves by stacking on more fear/pain of failure to overcome the fear/pain of doing something. A classic example would be procrastinating until just before the deadline, and then at the last moment getting an urgency to complete the thing and doing it at the last moment while find everything very uncomfortable.
The more strongly one’s motivation is built like this, the more likely it is that there will be a loss of agency after the sources of pain are removed, as one hasn’t developed positive forms of motivation that could pick up the slack when the negative forms of motivation are removed. That’s not to say that such a person would be doomed to a lifetime of non-agency! It’s possible to learn positive motivation, but it’s going to take time. Possibly several years.
On the other hand, Tucker Peck has a nice talk (“Meditation and Social Justice” on this page) about the way that many important things are really hard, and that if you need to see success right away, you may have little chance than to burn out. In that kind of a situation, a more enlightened-y mindset may be exactly what you need:
If you look at how many, I guess millions of people, risked their lives to create social change and they did it and then in a lot of countries, it just disappeared, you know, very quickly. It was back [to] the way it used to be. I read two of Gandhi’s autobiographical books in this past winter. And you know, in South Africa, [...] he’s there for maybe 18 years and he finally is able to Improve the standing of the Indians in South Africa and then he leaves and everything goes right back to the way that it used to be.
It’s not the change isn’t possible, it’s that change is awfully slow and things that look like victories can turn out to be nothing. [...] So if you have an attachment to a sense of self, feeling like a failure is going to be a lot harsher than if you don’t. But if you have an attachment to the outcome, I don’t see anything you could do besides burn out. [...]
When you are able to—not completely lose the sense of self necessarily, [but] at least diminish it, or have periods when it subsides—you can go to this place where all of your actions can be motivated by justice, by compassion, seeing yourself equally valuable to everybody else. And there’s no sense of burnout because there’s nothing else to do. Like the idea of giving up doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing to give up.
When you read people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi [...], the people who really lived the, religion of justice—they seem indefatigable. And they don’t seem to mind if they die from this. They sometimes don’t even seem to mind if they lose.
Neuroticism and conscientiousness are somewhat correlated in the literature and indeed it was my experience that boosting conscientiousness boosted neuroticism somewhat. Being able to spin these dials feels useful. Being very outcome focused rather than input focused is also a recipe for a lot of stress that doesn’t necessarily seem very correlated to good outcomes ime. Ofc we want some tracking of outputs as a feedback to inputs so there’s a balance to strike there.
Have you investigated the methods of past people you admire who tried for positive impact?
Big fan of both of your writings, this dialogue was a real treat for me.
I’ve been trying to find a satisfying answer to the seeming inverse correlation of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘agency’ (these are very loose labels).
You briefly allude to a potential mechanism for this[1]
You also briefly allude to another mechanism with explanatory power for the inverse[2] - i.e. that while it might seem an individual is highly agentic, they are in fact little more than a host for a highly agentic egregore
I’m engaged in that most quixotic endeavour of actually trying to save the world[3] [4], and thus I’m constantly playing with my world model and looking for levers to pull, dominos to push over, that might plausibly -and quickly- shift probability mass towards pleasant timelines.
I think germ theory is exactly the kind of intervention that works here—it’s a simple map that even a child can understand, yet it’s a 100x impact.
I think there’s some kind of ‘germ theory for minds’, and I think we already have all the pieces—we just need to put them together in the right way. I think it’s plausible that this is easy, rapidly scaleable and instrumentally valuable to other efforts in the ‘save the world’ space.
But… I don’t want to end up net negative on agency. In fact my primary objective is to end up strongly net positive. I need more people trying to change the world, not less.
Yet… that scale of ambition seems largely the preserve of people you’d be highly unlikey to describe as ‘enlightened’, ‘balanced’ or ‘well adjusted’; it seems to require a certain amount of delusion to even (want to) try, and benefit from unbalanced schema that are willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of success.
Most of the people who seem to succcessfully change the world are the people I least want to; whereas the people I most want to change the world seem the least likely to.
Since the schools that removed social conditioning and also empowered practitioners to upend the social order, tended to get targeted for destruction. (Or at least so I suspect and some people on Twitter said “yes this did happen” when I speculated this out loud.)
In the Buddhist model of human psychology, we are by default colonized by parasitic thought patterns, though I guess in some cases, like the aforementioned fertility increasing religious memes, they should be thought of as symbiotes with a tradeoff, such as degrading the hosts’ episteme.
I don’t expect to succeed, I don’t expect to even matter, but it’s a fun hobby.
Also the world does actually seem to be in rather urgent need of saving; short of a miracle or two it seems like I’m unlikely to live to enjoy my midlife crisis.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
I think that the likely impact on agency is complicated. One question is the extent to which your current agency is driven by something like pain avoidance.
@Matt Goldenberg has a nice concept of a mode of motivation he calls “the self-loathing monster”, where one effectively motivates themselves by stacking on more fear/pain of failure to overcome the fear/pain of doing something. A classic example would be procrastinating until just before the deadline, and then at the last moment getting an urgency to complete the thing and doing it at the last moment while find everything very uncomfortable.
The more strongly one’s motivation is built like this, the more likely it is that there will be a loss of agency after the sources of pain are removed, as one hasn’t developed positive forms of motivation that could pick up the slack when the negative forms of motivation are removed. That’s not to say that such a person would be doomed to a lifetime of non-agency! It’s possible to learn positive motivation, but it’s going to take time. Possibly several years.
On the other hand, Tucker Peck has a nice talk (“Meditation and Social Justice” on this page) about the way that many important things are really hard, and that if you need to see success right away, you may have little chance than to burn out. In that kind of a situation, a more enlightened-y mindset may be exactly what you need:
Neuroticism and conscientiousness are somewhat correlated in the literature and indeed it was my experience that boosting conscientiousness boosted neuroticism somewhat. Being able to spin these dials feels useful. Being very outcome focused rather than input focused is also a recipe for a lot of stress that doesn’t necessarily seem very correlated to good outcomes ime. Ofc we want some tracking of outputs as a feedback to inputs so there’s a balance to strike there.
Have you investigated the methods of past people you admire who tried for positive impact?