What is the #1 change that LW has instilled in me?
Participating in LW has instilled the virtue of goal orientation. All other virtues, including epistemic rationality, flow from that.
Learning how to set goals, investigate them, take action to achieve them, pivot when necessary, and alter your original goals in light of new evidence is a dynamic practice, one that I expect to retain for a long time.
Many memes circulate around this broad theme. But only here have I been able to develop an explicit, robust, ever-expanding framework for making and thinking about choices and actions.
This doesn’t mean I’m good at it, although I am much better than I used to be. It simply means that I’m goal-oriented about being goal-oriented. It feels palpably, viscerally different, from moment to moment.
Strangely enough, this goal orientation developed from a host of pre-existing desires. For coherence, precision, charity, logic, satisfaction, security. Practicing those led to goal orientation. Goal orientation is leading to other places.
Now, I recognize that the sense of right thinking comes through in a piece of writing when the author seems to share my goals and to advance them through their work. They are on my team, not necessarily culturally or politically, but on a more universal level, and they are helping us win.
I think that goal orientation is a hard quality to instill, although we are biologically hardwired to have desires, imaginations, intentions, and all the other psychological precursors to a goal.
But a goal. That is something refined and abstracted from the realm of the biological, although still bearing a 1-1 relation to it. I don’t know how you’d teach it. I think it comes through practice. From the sense that something can be achieved. Then trying to achieve and realizing that not only were you right, but you were thinking too small.SO many things can be achieved.
And then the passion starts, perhaps. The intoxication of building a mechanism—in any medium—that gives the user some new capability or idea, makes you wonder what you can do next. It makes you want to connect with others in a new way: fellow makers and shapers of the world, fellow agents. It drives home the pressing need for a shared language and virtuous behavior, lest potential be lost or disaster strike.
What is the #1 change that LW has instilled in me?
Participating in LW has instilled the virtue of goal orientation. All other virtues, including epistemic rationality, flow from that.
Learning how to set goals, investigate them, take action to achieve them, pivot when necessary, and alter your original goals in light of new evidence is a dynamic practice, one that I expect to retain for a long time.
Many memes circulate around this broad theme. But only here have I been able to develop an explicit, robust, ever-expanding framework for making and thinking about choices and actions.
This doesn’t mean I’m good at it, although I am much better than I used to be. It simply means that I’m goal-oriented about being goal-oriented. It feels palpably, viscerally different, from moment to moment.
Strangely enough, this goal orientation developed from a host of pre-existing desires. For coherence, precision, charity, logic, satisfaction, security. Practicing those led to goal orientation. Goal orientation is leading to other places.
Now, I recognize that the sense of right thinking comes through in a piece of writing when the author seems to share my goals and to advance them through their work. They are on my team, not necessarily culturally or politically, but on a more universal level, and they are helping us win.
I think that goal orientation is a hard quality to instill, although we are biologically hardwired to have desires, imaginations, intentions, and all the other psychological precursors to a goal.
But a goal. That is something refined and abstracted from the realm of the biological, although still bearing a 1-1 relation to it. I don’t know how you’d teach it. I think it comes through practice. From the sense that something can be achieved. Then trying to achieve and realizing that not only were you right, but you were thinking too small. SO many things can be achieved.
And then the passion starts, perhaps. The intoxication of building a mechanism—in any medium—that gives the user some new capability or idea, makes you wonder what you can do next. It makes you want to connect with others in a new way: fellow makers and shapers of the world, fellow agents. It drives home the pressing need for a shared language and virtuous behavior, lest potential be lost or disaster strike.
I don’t move through the world as I did before.