This is a somewhat old post, but I thought it was underappreciated (other LW mods weren’t quite sure why I wanted to curate it).
I think the core concept here was a crisp articulation of something I hadn’t had a clear handle on, but I think is a key rationality concept. And as Zvi dug into the different examples, it was very illuminating how confused and jumbled my default intuitions about being “Okay” and “Not okay” were.
Distinguishing the psychological state of “things are okay/not-okay” from the reality of “are things ‘okay’ within some frame of judgment?” seems really important. This feels similar to Nate Soare’s post about how to detach the attitude of ‘conviction’ from your epistemic assessment of “will Project X work out?”
It happened to be particularly relevant to me this week, as I was feeling a sense of ‘things are not okay’, and looking around, things in fact seemed ‘not okay’ in many objective senses. Nonetheless, being in “not okay mode” was making it harder to think sensibly.
I liked Zvi’s exploration of how the concept of “Are things okay?” can get distorted at the group rationality level, where people might pressure people help them adopt a “I can be okay” stance by ignoring problems, or shuffling responsibility for them around, without noticing that that’s what you’re doing.
Longterm, I’d be interested in both:
Better teaching techniques for helping individuals learn skills relating into “be in psychological ‘okay-mode’, in the places where it’s useful to be so, without losing sight of object-level reality.”
Having good group-practices for how to relate to okay-mode.
A criticism I have of this piece, similar to some other Zvi pieces that do an exhaustive taxonomy, is that it’s overly long and the individual examples are just given simple letters that get really hard to follow in the second half. (similar complaint on Simple Rules of Law, despite also liking that post a lot). I’m not actually sure how to solve the problem though.
Curated.
This is a somewhat old post, but I thought it was underappreciated (other LW mods weren’t quite sure why I wanted to curate it).
I think the core concept here was a crisp articulation of something I hadn’t had a clear handle on, but I think is a key rationality concept. And as Zvi dug into the different examples, it was very illuminating how confused and jumbled my default intuitions about being “Okay” and “Not okay” were.
Distinguishing the psychological state of “things are okay/not-okay” from the reality of “are things ‘okay’ within some frame of judgment?” seems really important. This feels similar to Nate Soare’s post about how to detach the attitude of ‘conviction’ from your epistemic assessment of “will Project X work out?”
It happened to be particularly relevant to me this week, as I was feeling a sense of ‘things are not okay’, and looking around, things in fact seemed ‘not okay’ in many objective senses. Nonetheless, being in “not okay mode” was making it harder to think sensibly.
I liked Zvi’s exploration of how the concept of “Are things okay?” can get distorted at the group rationality level, where people might pressure people help them adopt a “I can be okay” stance by ignoring problems, or shuffling responsibility for them around, without noticing that that’s what you’re doing.
Longterm, I’d be interested in both:
Better teaching techniques for helping individuals learn skills relating into “be in psychological ‘okay-mode’, in the places where it’s useful to be so, without losing sight of object-level reality.”
Having good group-practices for how to relate to okay-mode.
A criticism I have of this piece, similar to some other Zvi pieces that do an exhaustive taxonomy, is that it’s overly long and the individual examples are just given simple letters that get really hard to follow in the second half. (similar complaint on Simple Rules of Law, despite also liking that post a lot). I’m not actually sure how to solve the problem though.