Eliezer: “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this publicly before...”
You definitely haven’t mentioned that publicly in any place that I read, which makes me glad I decided to dip into the comments of this post. I always felt a tacit acceptance, or at least no active disagreement on your part of Jef’s posts on similar subjects on SL4 and other online fora. (at least any available to immediate recall)
The subject of what parts of my influences, tendencies and opinions, and identifiable hardware quirks I call ‘myself’ is a driver of cycles of stress and self-doubt to me. Nobody here has mentioned anything similar, but I tend to experience this in two ways, extreme doubt and nostalgia regarding tendencies and traits I’ve eliminated or lost from myself, and increasing ambivalence and bifurcated opinion about things I feel I’m going to have to jettison or become averse to in the future.
The concrete issue of techniques to condition against bias or mental procedures to work through unwanted tendencies is something I’m always fascinated to hear scraps of from other rationalists and self-modifiers. It can’t all be rationalization and reflection, I know from personal experience that can’t touch everything, so how do other people correct? My own procedures seem fairly haphazard and I adopt them only out of pragmatism, not out of any confidence in their theoretical grounding.
Eliezer: “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this publicly before...”
You definitely haven’t mentioned that publicly in any place that I read, which makes me glad I decided to dip into the comments of this post. I always felt a tacit acceptance, or at least no active disagreement on your part of Jef’s posts on similar subjects on SL4 and other online fora. (at least any available to immediate recall)
The subject of what parts of my influences, tendencies and opinions, and identifiable hardware quirks I call ‘myself’ is a driver of cycles of stress and self-doubt to me. Nobody here has mentioned anything similar, but I tend to experience this in two ways, extreme doubt and nostalgia regarding tendencies and traits I’ve eliminated or lost from myself, and increasing ambivalence and bifurcated opinion about things I feel I’m going to have to jettison or become averse to in the future.
The concrete issue of techniques to condition against bias or mental procedures to work through unwanted tendencies is something I’m always fascinated to hear scraps of from other rationalists and self-modifiers. It can’t all be rationalization and reflection, I know from personal experience that can’t touch everything, so how do other people correct? My own procedures seem fairly haphazard and I adopt them only out of pragmatism, not out of any confidence in their theoretical grounding.