Here’s Duncan Sabien describing the experience of honing down on a particular felt sense
I’m confused—the original author seems to be Connor Morton?
Celarix
Karma: 366
I mean, sure, but that does kinda answer the question in the question—“if event X happens, should you believe that event X is possible?” Well, yes, because it happened. I guess, in that case, the question could be more measuring something like “I, a Rationalist, would not believe in ghosts because that would lower my status in the Rationalist community, despite seeing strong evidence for it”
Sort of like asking “are you a Rationalist or are you just saying so for status points?”
I kinda disagree—if you see ghosts, almost all the probability space should be moving to “I am hallucinating”.
Fair! That’s a simple if not easy solution, definitely bottom-left quadrant instead of bottom-right!
Likely true. The sorts of problems I was thinking about for the razor are ones that have had a simple solutions for a very long time—walking, talking, sending electrical current from one place to another, illuminating spaces, stuff like that.
Perhaps a 2x2 grid would be helpful?
I feel like this post is standing against the top-left quadrant and would prefer everyone to move to the bottom-left quadrant, which I agree with. My concern is the people in the bottom-right quadrant, which I don’t believe lukehmiles is in, but I fear they may use this post as fuel for their belief—i.e. “depression is easy, you attention-seeking loser! just stop being sad, it’s a solved problem!”
Yes, so long as one can tell the difference between a problem that is solved (construction, microprocessor design, etc.) and one that is not (“depressed? just stop being sad, it’s easy”)
Also, we might apply an unnamed razor: If a problem has a simple solution, everyone would already be doing it.
I broadly agree, but I think it’s worth it to learn to distinguish scenarios where a simple solution is known from ones where it is not. We have, say, building design and construction down pat, but AGI alignment? A solid cure for many illnesses? The obesity crisis? No simple solution is currently known.
Pretty good overall. My favorite posts are about the theory of the human mind that helps me build a model of my own mind and the minds of others, especially in how it can go wrong (mental illness, ADHD, et. al.)
The AI stuff is way over my head, to the point where my brain just bounces off of the titles alone, but that’s fine—not everything is for everyone. Also reading the acronyms EDT and CDT always make me think of the timezones, not the decision theories.
About the only complaint I have is that the comments can get pretty dense and recursively meta, which can be a bit hard to follow. Zvi will occasionally talk about a survey of AI safety experts giving predictions about stuff and it just feels like a person talking about people talking about predictions about risks associated with AI. But this is more of a me thing and probably people who can keep up find these things very useful.
This post demonstrates another surface of the important interplay between our “logical” (really just verbal) part-of-mind and our emotional part-of-mind. Other posts on this site, including by Kaj Sotala and Valentine, go into this interplay and how our rationality is affected by it.
It’s important to note, both for ourselves and for our relationships with others, that the emotional part is not something that can be dismissed or fought with, and I think this post does well in explaining an important facet of that. Plus, when we’re shown the possible pitfalls ahead of any limerence, we can be more aware of it when we do fall in love, which is always nice.
My review mostly concerns the SMTM’s A Chemical Hunger part of this review. RaDVaC was interesting if not particularly useful, but SMTM’s series has been noted by many commenters to be a strange theory, possibly damaging, and there were, as of my last check, no response by SMTM to the various rebuttals.
It does not behoove rationalism to have members that do not respond to critical looks at their theories. They stand to do a lot of damage and cost a lot of lives if taken seriously.
Oh, yes, true. However, I still maintain that particularly jerkish people would be happy to misgender in that manner as they’d think that the only good gender is male or somesuch nonsense.
Counterpoint: it could also be because the speaker thinks male is default and automatically thinks of an unknown person as male.
20. Memetic Razor: If you hear news “through the grapevine” or see something on the “popular” feeds of social media, it has likely traveled a long journey of memetic selection to get to you, and is almost certainly modified from the original.
I notice I feel some opposition to this, mostly on the grounds that messing with nature tends to end rather poorly for us. Nature is trillions of deeply interconnected dimensions doing who-knows-what at every layer; there is a small chance that release of these gene drives could be an x-risk. So do we take a guaranteed 600,000 dead every year, or an x% chance of accidentally wiping out all life on Earth? What value of x is acceptably low?
This is good stuff, thank you. I think these are all good ways to avoid the trap of letting others decide your goals for you, and I like the idea of continuously changing your goals if you find they aren’t working/have been Goodharted/etc.
Good catch, didn’t think of that. Definitely seems like peer pressure is a better way to change minds rather than one-on-one. This is still parasitism, though—I don’t know if I’d trust most people to form a group to hold me accountable for changes in my behavior. Seems too easy for them to, intentionally or not, shape my request into ways that benefit them.
For example, I might form a group to help me lose weight. I care very much about my physical wellbeing and reducing discomfort, but they might care more about my ugly appearance and assume that’s what I’m going for, too. Worse yet, my discomfort is invisible to them, and my ugliness in their eyes is invisible to me!
Certainly not an insurmountable obstacle, of course, but one to be aware of.
EDIT: I read your paragraph on cults and then completely ignored it when writing my response. Of course you know that peer pressure can be bad, you said it yourself. My mistake.
I do have this feeling from time to time. Some stuff that’s helped me:
Simplify, simplify, simplify. Do your chores with as little effort as possible, per https://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/. Buy stuff that does your work for you. Your goal is to complete your chores, not to do work; work is in service to the goal, not the goal itself.
Success by default. Make the easiest, lowest-energy, laziest way to do the thing also the right way. Have exactly one clothes hamper for dirty clothes. Buy clothes that don’t need ironing. Put decorative items on unused surfaces so you don’t put random junk on them.
Suggested to me by ACX commenters: random rewards. Pick something you like (chocolates, kisses from your wife, etc.) and set up a timer that goes off at a randomly selected interval which entitles you to that reward. The randomness might help your brain to associate chores with better feelings.
Make it satisfying: Power-washers for big jobs, steam cleaners, compressed air, powered dish brushes. There’s a lot of cleaning content on /r/oddlysatisfying for a reason.
This next one’s a lot more speculative, feel free to completely disregard. Seriously, I’m suggesting the following because it works for me, but my anxiety response might be way less than yours is and my method might be totally useless for that.
Anyway, it sounds like you have a strong anxiety response when either doing chores or thinking about them. I had a similar issue, and my strategy was flooding, exposure therapy turned up to eleven. Do not recommend.
My real suggestion is, when you feel these racing thoughts and fast breathing, is to stop the chore for a moment and stand there. Don’t try to distract yourself, because the focus is, for a moment, now on the anxiety response itself.
For me, anxiety is a series of waves of intense physical symptoms like fast heartbeat and breathlessness. There’s definitely a sense of “here it comes!” before each next wave. One thing that helped me was realizing that, while the anxiety response can be quite long-lived, each wave was only 10-15 seconds long. Noticing this gave me strength; if I make it through this wave, I’ll have a few minutes to work with the anxiety before the next. This may not be true for you, though.
You say that the endless nature of these chores terrifies you. In this moment of standing still, your goal is to dig a bit deeper, to try to ask “why does the fact that these chores are endless scare me so much?”
Possible answers could be:
Endless chores scare me because they’ll take up a huge chunk of my finite life.
Endless chores scare me because every time I finish them, I have to do them again soon; all my previous work has amounted to nothing.
Endless chores scare me because my thoughts race and my breathing speeds up.
Or something else entirely! It might take awhile to get a good answer, and you might have to think through many of them until one seems to fit.
All this might sound very familiar; you say you’re taking anxiety medication, but you may also have heard all this through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) or meditation. Again, my advice works for me but may not work for you! Please don’t feel bad if this doesn’t apply!
Not a full answer, but Kaj Sotala’s Multiagent Models of Mind (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip) is a great sequence that introduces some of these concepts.
Cool, thank you!
Noted, thank you.