This post caused me to notice the ways that I find emergencies attractive. I am myself drawn to scenarios where all the moves are forced moves. If there’s a fire, there’s no uncertainty, no awkwardness, I just do whatever I can right now to put it out. It’s like reality is just dragging me along and I don’t really have to take responsibility for the rest of it, because all the tradeoffs are easy and any harder evaluations must be tightly time-bounded. I have started to notice the unhealthy ways in which I am drawn to things that have this nature, even when it’s not worth it.
This post also pointed out the ways that emergencies are memetically fit, in that if you can convince people that your issue is an emergency, you can draw a lot of action and attention out from a lot of people right now. That’s a powerful force. That made me update downward substantially on the background rate of emergencies in the world, even when everyone around me is screaming (euphemistically).
I think this post also helped me think about the long-term future more clearly. I often feel like my primary bottleneck in life is “believing that the future exists”, and this helped me notice another way that I would behave differently if I believed that the future existed.
Also a great comment section (including but not limited to the comment by Anna on what she cut, which gave me a lot of the first two bullets).
A few points:
This post caused me to notice the ways that I find emergencies attractive. I am myself drawn to scenarios where all the moves are forced moves. If there’s a fire, there’s no uncertainty, no awkwardness, I just do whatever I can right now to put it out. It’s like reality is just dragging me along and I don’t really have to take responsibility for the rest of it, because all the tradeoffs are easy and any harder evaluations must be tightly time-bounded. I have started to notice the unhealthy ways in which I am drawn to things that have this nature, even when it’s not worth it.
This post also pointed out the ways that emergencies are memetically fit, in that if you can convince people that your issue is an emergency, you can draw a lot of action and attention out from a lot of people right now. That’s a powerful force. That made me update downward substantially on the background rate of emergencies in the world, even when everyone around me is screaming (euphemistically).
I think this post also helped me think about the long-term future more clearly. I often feel like my primary bottleneck in life is “believing that the future exists”, and this helped me notice another way that I would behave differently if I believed that the future existed.
Also a great comment section (including but not limited to the comment by Anna on what she cut, which gave me a lot of the first two bullets).
+9.