Insightful all the way through, but especially worth it for the last large paragraph. I feel like that applies to all sorts of things that people both feel they should do and also feel on reflection would be actively good for them, and yet nevertheless never manage to get to.
Huh, that’s an interesting frame. So if your environment does not naturally enable you to get much exercise, that should register as an alarming.
I’m not sure whether this remains useful when extended to everything that I feel like I should do. There’s a sense in which maybe it’s alarming that I don’t get around to meditating, to optimizing my financial investments, to trying a new experience each week (to name the first things that came to mind after 5 minutes of thought). But whether you should process things as “I am not okay” or a state of alarm depends on who you are.
Alarm means “things are bad enough that I should drop everything and fix this particular thing”. If you end up in a permanent state of alarm than nothing is alarming.
Might still be worth trying on for particular things. Dunno. Mulling it over.
Here’s a different framing on the same thing—if you see how it is pointing to the same thing as my other comment here, then you’ve fully understood the generator of what I’m saying:
By far the most important EA cause area—unless AI timelines are so short that you think the world will actually end within a couple decades—is ending this pervasive state of emergency. We need to figure out how human beings can live with enough breathing room to use our full human cognition, without giving up on the highly leveraged tech of the modern economy. This shouldn’t trade off against life maintenance, it should come out of your long-term world improvement resource budget.
I’m currently lucky enough to be able to work part-time on my projects to do with autonomy/IA. I have 1 week off in 5. I have an employer that has part-time jobs ingrained into it due to being flexible for parents and carers. I do know other people (in tech jobs) who have taken 1 day off in 5.
I do write etc on my week off, but I catch up on other tasks and take as much time as I want to figure out what it is I should be doing.
I think I will find it harder to maintain when I switch jobs, so it keeps me in my current job somewhat. It would be easier to maintain if it wasn’t just me but I could point to a respected research organisation or similar that I researched for, where my output was not managed at all. But what output I did have I could always thank/attribute to the Organisation.
Obviously I am lucky to have a high paying job, so the salary cut is not too much to impact my long term plans. But my point is more that it is easier to have socially acceptable slack. Sabbath fits that bill for you, but would be an ask for someone not in the tradition.
This helped me see a way the alarm section was unclear, thanks.
I don’t mean that Sabbath practice is uniquely important such that if you’re not doing it, this is an isolated emergency. I mean something more like, the Sabbath is fundamentally in tension with living in a permanent state of emergency, such that if you can’t keep it, there will be lots of other things you’re neglecting as well. This seems to be the general condition in our urbanized society. The right response isn’t necessarily to force yourself into a Sabbath practice anyway, unless that’s your high-leverage path to a more systemic solution.
You’re likely already pushing yourself too hard too often, that’s what it means to live in a permanent state of emergency. I’m claiming that we’re already living in a permanent state of alarm, and I’m trying to denormalize that.
Think of it like this—there’s an area-effect spell that causes everyone to inflate the importance of keeping up with short-term tasks and systems, at the expense of their long-run interests or situational awareness. Some people are trying to point out the existence of this area-effect spell, but due to the effects of the spell, their warnings are interpreted as yet another short-term task to add to the stack. What I’m trying to say is something more like, if you agree that there’s a permanent state of emergency, then you should drop everything else and figure out how to get out of that loop.
Part of the problem of “drop everything else” is that it can’t possibly be meant literally. I don’t mean that you should stop breathing or eating until we solve the thing. But the area-effect spell causes people to conflate keeping up with fashions, with basic life maintenance.
Insightful all the way through, but especially worth it for the last large paragraph. I feel like that applies to all sorts of things that people both feel they should do and also feel on reflection would be actively good for them, and yet nevertheless never manage to get to.
Huh, that’s an interesting frame. So if your environment does not naturally enable you to get much exercise, that should register as an alarming.
I’m not sure whether this remains useful when extended to everything that I feel like I should do. There’s a sense in which maybe it’s alarming that I don’t get around to meditating, to optimizing my financial investments, to trying a new experience each week (to name the first things that came to mind after 5 minutes of thought). But whether you should process things as “I am not okay” or a state of alarm depends on who you are.
Alarm means “things are bad enough that I should drop everything and fix this particular thing”. If you end up in a permanent state of alarm than nothing is alarming.
Might still be worth trying on for particular things. Dunno. Mulling it over.
Here’s a different framing on the same thing—if you see how it is pointing to the same thing as my other comment here, then you’ve fully understood the generator of what I’m saying:
By far the most important EA cause area—unless AI timelines are so short that you think the world will actually end within a couple decades—is ending this pervasive state of emergency. We need to figure out how human beings can live with enough breathing room to use our full human cognition, without giving up on the highly leveraged tech of the modern economy. This shouldn’t trade off against life maintenance, it should come out of your long-term world improvement resource budget.
I’m currently lucky enough to be able to work part-time on my projects to do with autonomy/IA. I have 1 week off in 5. I have an employer that has part-time jobs ingrained into it due to being flexible for parents and carers. I do know other people (in tech jobs) who have taken 1 day off in 5.
I do write etc on my week off, but I catch up on other tasks and take as much time as I want to figure out what it is I should be doing.
I think I will find it harder to maintain when I switch jobs, so it keeps me in my current job somewhat. It would be easier to maintain if it wasn’t just me but I could point to a respected research organisation or similar that I researched for, where my output was not managed at all. But what output I did have I could always thank/attribute to the Organisation.
Obviously I am lucky to have a high paying job, so the salary cut is not too much to impact my long term plans. But my point is more that it is easier to have socially acceptable slack. Sabbath fits that bill for you, but would be an ask for someone not in the tradition.
Ah, gotcha.
This helped me see a way the alarm section was unclear, thanks.
I don’t mean that Sabbath practice is uniquely important such that if you’re not doing it, this is an isolated emergency. I mean something more like, the Sabbath is fundamentally in tension with living in a permanent state of emergency, such that if you can’t keep it, there will be lots of other things you’re neglecting as well. This seems to be the general condition in our urbanized society. The right response isn’t necessarily to force yourself into a Sabbath practice anyway, unless that’s your high-leverage path to a more systemic solution.
You’re likely already pushing yourself too hard too often, that’s what it means to live in a permanent state of emergency. I’m claiming that we’re already living in a permanent state of alarm, and I’m trying to denormalize that.
Think of it like this—there’s an area-effect spell that causes everyone to inflate the importance of keeping up with short-term tasks and systems, at the expense of their long-run interests or situational awareness. Some people are trying to point out the existence of this area-effect spell, but due to the effects of the spell, their warnings are interpreted as yet another short-term task to add to the stack. What I’m trying to say is something more like, if you agree that there’s a permanent state of emergency, then you should drop everything else and figure out how to get out of that loop.
Part of the problem of “drop everything else” is that it can’t possibly be meant literally. I don’t mean that you should stop breathing or eating until we solve the thing. But the area-effect spell causes people to conflate keeping up with fashions, with basic life maintenance.