Some of the probability questions (many worlds, simulation) are like… ontologically weird enough that I’m not entirely certain it makes sense to assign probabilities to them? It doesn’t really feel like they pay rent in anticipated experience?
I’m not sure “speaking the truth even when it’s uncomfortable” is the kind of skill it makes sense to describe yourself as “comfortable” with.
I think it’s pretty good to keep it in mind that heliocentrism is literally speaking just a change in what coordinate system you use, but it is legitimately a much more convenient coordinate system.
Switch to neuroscience. I think we have an innate “sense of sociality” in our brainstem (or maybe hypothalamus), analogous to how (I claim) fear-of-heights is triggered by an innate brainstem “sense” that we’re standing over a precipice.
I think lately I’ve noticed how much written text triggers this for me varying a bit over time?
...Does that hold together as a potential explanation for why our universe is so young? Huh.
I think my ideal is to lean into weirdness in a way that doesn’t rely on ignorance of normal conventions
For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn’t easily tell how true they were… which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?
I think there is rather a lot of soap to be found… but it’s very much not something you can find by taking official doctrine as an actual authority.
That does seem likely.
There’s a complication where sometimes it’s very difficult to get people not to interpret things as an instruction. “Confuse them” seems to work, I guess, but it does have drawbacks too.
I don’t really have a good idea of the principles, here. Personally, whenever I’ve made a big difference in a person’s life (and it’s been obvious to me that I’ve done so), I try to take care of them as much as I can and make sure they’re okay.
...However, I have ran into a couple issues with this. Sometimes someone or something takes too much energy, and some distance is healthier. I don’t know how to judge this other than intuition, but I think I’ve gone too far before?
And I have no idea how much this can scale. I think I’ve had far bigger impacts than I’ve intended, in some cases. One time I had a friend who was really in trouble and I had to go to pretty substantial lengths to get them to a better place, and I’m not sure all versions of them would’ve endorsed that, even if they do now.
...But, broadly, “do what you can to empower other people to make their own decisions, when you can, instead of trying to tell them what to do” does seem like a good principle, especially for the people who have more power in a given situation? I definitely haven’t treated this as an absolute rule, but in most cases I’m pretty careful not to stray from it.
I don’t really think money is the only plausible explanation, here?
I think the game is sufficiently difficult.
I read this post several years ago, but I was… basically just trapped in a “finishing high school and then college” narrative at the time, it didn’t really seem like I could use this idea to actually make any changes in my life… And then a few months ago, as I was finishing up my last semester of college, I sort of fell head first into Mythic Mode without understanding what I was doing very much at all.
And I’d say it made a lot of things better, definitely—the old narrative was a terrible one for me—but it was rocky in some ways, and… like, obviously thoughts like “confirmation bias” etc were occurring to me, but “there are biases involved here” doesn’t, really, in and of itself tell you what to do?
It would make sense if there’s some extent to which everyone who spent the first part of their life following along with a simple “go to school and then get a job i guess” script is going to have a substantial adjustment period once they start having some more interesting life experiences, but… also seems plausible that if I’d read a lot more about this sort of thing I’d’ve been better equipped.
To have a go at it:
Some people try to implement a decision-making strategy that’s like, “I should focus mostly on System 1” or “I should focus mostly on System 2.” But this isn’t really the point. The goal is to develop an ability to judge which scenarios call for which types of mental activities, and to be able to combine System 1 and System 2 together fluidly as needed.
Thank you.
I, similarly, am pretty sure I had a lot of conformist-ish biases that prevented me from seriously considering lines of argument like this one.
Like, I’m certainly not entirely sure how strong this (and related) reasoning is, but it’s definitely something one ought to seriously think about.
This post definitely resolved some confusions for me. There are still a whole lot of philosophical issues, but it’s very nice to have a clearer model of what’s going on with the initial naïve conception of value.
I do actually think my practice of rationality was benefited by spending some time seriously grappling with the possibility that everything I knew was wrong. Like, yeah, I did quickly reaccept many things, but it was still a helpful exercise.
This feels more like an argument that Wentworth’s model is low-resolution than that he’s actually misidentified where the disagreement is?
I mostly think it’s too loose a heuristic and that you should dig into more details