It is the case that Bryce is, ostensibly, just trying to help Ash fulfill their terminal goals while being healthier. The problem is that Bryce presumes that of the available action space, ice cream is fungible for something else that is healthier, and does not listen when Ash reasserts that ice cream itself is the thing they want.
Just because it is a safe bet that Ash will share the value/desire for good health does not mean Ash must prioritize good health in every action they take.
I just donated $1,000. This is not a minor amount for me, and I almost just donated $10 as suggested in Shoshannah’s comment, but I knew I could donate that much without thought or effort, and I wanted to really put at least some effort into this, after seeing how much obvious effort Oliver and others at Lesswrong have been putting in.
My decision process was as follows:
First, I dealt with my risk aversion/loss aversion/flinch response to giving large sums of money away. This took a couple minutes, much faster than it used to be thanks to things like my Season of Wealth a couple years ago, but felt like a mildly sharp object jiggling around in my chest until I smoothed it out with reminders of how much money I make these days compared to the relatively poor upbringing I had and the not-particularly-high salary I made for the first ~decade of my adult life.
Second, I thought of how much I value Lesswrong and Lighthaven existing in the world as a vague thing. Impersonally, not in the ways they have affected me, just like… worlds-with-these-people-doing-this-thing-in-it vs worlds-without. This got me up to a feeling of more than double what I wanted to give, somewhere around 25ish.
Third, I thought about how much value I personally have gained from Lesswrong and Lighthaven. I cannot really put a number on this. It’s hard to disentangle the value from all the various sources in the rationality space, and the people who posts on LW and attended Lighthaven events. This ballooned the amount to something extremely hard to measure. Far more than $100, but probably less than 10,000?
Fourth, I dealt with the flinch-response again. 10,000 is a lot for me. I lost more than that due to FTX’s collapse even before the clawback stress started, and that took a bit of time to stop feeling internal jabs over. A few subsections needed dealing with; what if I have an emergency and need lots of money? What if my hypothetical future wife or kids do? Would I regret donating then? This bumped me way back down to the hundreds range.
Fifth, I thought about how I would feel if I woke up today and instead of reading this post, I read a post saying that they had to shut down Lighthaven, and maybe even LessWrong, due to lack of funding. How much I would regret not having donated money, even if it didn’t end up helping. I’m still quite sad that we lost Wytham, and would pay money to retroactively try to save it if I could. This brought me up to something like $3-500.
Sixth, I confronted the niggling thought of “hopefully someone out there will donate enough that my contribution will not really matter, so maybe I don’t even need to really donate much at all?” This thought felt bad, and I had a brief chat with my parts, thanking my internal pragmatism for its role in ensuring we’re not being wasteful before exploring together if this is the sort of person we want to be when other people might need us. After that conversation was over the number had stabilized around 500.
Seventh, I thought about the social signal if I say I donated a lot and how this might encourage others to donate more too, effectively increasing the amount Lesswrong gets, and decided this didn’t really affect much. Maybe a minor effect toward increasing, but nothing noticeable.
Eighth, I thought about the impact to the world re: Alignment. I felt the black hole there, the potential infinite abyss that I could throw my savings and life into and probably not get any useful effect out of, and spent some time with that before examining it again and feeling like another few hundred may not “make sense” in one direction or the other, but felt better than not doing it.
And ninth, I finally thought about the individuals working at Lighthaven that I know. How much do I trust them? How much do I want them to feel supported and motivated and cared for by the community they’re contributing so much to?
By the end of that I was around 8-900 and I thought, fuck it, I’ve made stupider financial decisions than an extra hundred bucks for a fancy T-shirt, and nice round numbers are nice and round.
Thank you all for all you do. I hope this helps.
Sure. So, there are some workplaces have implicit cultural norms that aren’t written down but are crucial for career advancement. Always being available and responding to emails quickly might be an unspoken expectation, or participating in after-work social events might not be mandatory but would be noted and count against people looking for promotion. Certain dress codes or communication styles might be rewarded or penalized beyond their actual professional relevance.
In a community, this usually comes as a form of purity testing of some kind, but can also be related to preferences around how you socialize or what you spend your time doing. If you’re in a community that thinks sex-work is low status, for example, and you want to ask if that’s true… just asking might in fact be costly, because it might clue people in to your potential interest in doing it.
Does that make sense?
I agree that those are the thoughts at the surface-level of Bryce in those situations, and they are not the same as “it’s wrong/stupid to enjoy eating ice cream.”
But I think in many cases, they often do imply “and you are stupid/irrational if knowing these things does not spoil your enjoyment or shift your hedonic attractor.” And even if Bryce genuinely doesn’t feel that way, I hope they would still be very careful with their wording to avoid that implication.
The implication that the preference itself is bad only works with assumptions that the preference will cause harm, to yourself or others, even if you don’t act on it. But I don’t think this is always true; it’s often a matter of degree or context, and how the person’s inner life works.
We could certainly say it is inconvenient or dysfunctional to have a preference that causes suffering for the self or others, and maybe that’s what you mean by “bad.” But this still doesn’t justify the assertion that “expressing” the preference is “wrong.” That’s the thing that feels particularly presumptuous, to me, about how preferences should be distinguished from actions.
Ah, yeah I definitely struggle a bit sometimes with people who make objective-assertion-type-statements when promoting or defending things they enjoy. I also gain quite a lot of enjoyment from looking at various kinds of media with a critical eye; I just do my best to keep that criticism in contexts where the listener or reader wants to share it :)
Excellent points! Yes, this is definitely a fun and interesting thing to engage with intellectually so long as both people feel like it’s being done in a non-judgmental or agendic way. Part of why I included the paragraphs about non-filtering being hard for some people is that I know there are some brains for which this genuinely doesn’t feel like it “should” be hostile or pressurey, since they don’t perceive it that way… but as in all things, that’s why your point about actually paying attention to what the other person says and taking it seriously is so important.
Makes sense! I probably will not have time to dedicate to do this properly over the next few days, but maybe after that.
I’m a little confused. Do the examples in the post seem purely hypothetical to you? They’re all real things I have encountered or heard from others:
Whether or not it’s rational to have ice cream (or other unhealthy indulgences).
Whether or not wanting your high-earning partner to do housework is reasonable.
Whether being hurt by unfiltered criticism or judgements is rational.
Whether being mono vs open vs poly is a sign of rationality.
Whether your career preference is a sign of how smart or rational you are.
Obviously not all are as equally detailed, and I could always add more, but if it doesn’t seem concrete enough yet, I’m not sure what else I should add or in how much detail to hit the target better.
Completely agree, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think anything in the frame of my post contradicts these points.
“You either do or do not feel a want” is not the same as “you either do now or you never will,” and I note that conditioning is also a cause of preferences, though I will edit to highlight that this is an ongoing process in case it sounds like I was saying it’s all locked-in from some vague “past” or developmental experiences (which was not my intent).
To your first point, I do believe the post covers this; specifically, the idea that e.g. frames and predictions can be mistaken, and correcting those mistakes can change emotional reactivity. Is that not what you mean?
For the second point… if they follow their preferences, they are acting, and if they are wrong it’s because it causes harm, no? I do not believe preferences themselves, or expressing them, should ever be considered wrong; that seems an artifact of Puritanical norms and fears.
I think wants that arise from conscious thought are, fundamentally, wants that arise from feelings attached to those conscious thoughts. The conscious thought processes may be mistaken in many ways, but they still evoke memories or predictions that trigger emotions associated with imagined world-states, which translate to wants or not-wants.
I don’t see how your question contradicts my statement, nor that link. People absolutely develop in their desires over time, and can change them, but that is not the same as being able to decide, in the moment, that you do not like the taste of pizza if your tongue is having the sensory experience of enjoying it.
Hm. I think I disagree on both counts; we maybe need to operationalize the words, but while I think hatred of others can be very valuable in some cases from a game theoretic perspective, and is very natural given that, lacking it is absolutely not something I’ve seen consistent in “unwell people,” and I’ve never known it to be “useful” for people who can protect themselves or others without it.
To be clear, anger is extremely valuable for self protection and boundaries, and I never claimed to not get angry. So if that’s what you meant, then yes, people who can’t summon anger in defense of themselves or others are often unwell or in denial of how bad their circumstances are.
But in most cases I’ve seen, “hatred” of people, especially people who are fundamentally not malicious or sadistic, but just fairly flawed, seems to me a much stronger sign of unwellness than wellness, particularly if the person is not subject to ongoing pain or suffering.
As for finding the childhood “not terrible,” I’m reminded of the xkcd on self reporting pain ratings :P
I grew up in a relatively safe part of the Miami suburbs, but it was still Miami, and I was guest to a lot of shitty households (even before I started working as a therapist) that made me thankful for the things I did have; three meals a day most days, a mom who worked multiple jobs to afford private school for at least a few years, gifts on holidays and birthdays, a secure home that I never worried about losing (other than from the occasional hurricane) and which I knew would always be there for me if I needed a place to stay, even when I much preferred going elsewhere.
You might say this is just the result of anchoring in a different direction, but to me it just feels like having had a wide perspective. I don’t not know what good families are like. I knew it from the start, because of fiction. It was always obvious what was wrong, when something was wrong, and what was right when it was right.
My basic point is just that I and many people would describe similarly mixed upbringings as not terrible, and they wouldn’t be in denial about it. My family messed up in a lot of ways, but they were still, most of the time, a functional system, where people gave each other support and showed affection and took care of each other when they were hurt or sick. It was also a place where people occasionally screamed at each other, and cried. Sometimes things were broken, sometimes people were hit. These are terrible things to have happen, but they were not the dominant experience compared to the good things.
I mentioned some of the most negative things because they were relevant to point out the ways my upbringing was not obviously responsible for some positive aspects of myself, but there was plenty of positive unrelated to the things I mentioned, and I gave that disclaimer because I think most people do not actually have a wide enough sample set to accurately judge the the range from “not terrible” to “terrible,” especially given (understandable) protectiveness of children’s wellbeing.
I’ve had many conversations with many people, young and old, why the things they experienced as children were abusive or “not okay.” I’ve also had to intervene in enough truly, actually abusive households to know what my own experience was and wasn’t. I don’t excuse anything my family did, which is a big part of why I left, but they tried their best. I wish I’d grown up in a happier home, but I was still luckier than many others I grew up around, and I don’t hold any ill will toward people who were clearly lacking in the knowledge, resources, emotional stability, etc, to do better than they did.
I appreciate the acknowledgement against psychoanalyzing people in public, and I agree that trying to cargoculting any of this is unlikely to go well, but I’d be curious to know what specific things you think can also fall under “being very unwell?” I just reread the excerpts Chris highlighted and the only thing I can think of is the “letting go of anger” thing, which is only a sign of unwellness, imo, if it leads to being exploited/abused/etc.
I didn’t pick the title, but I definitely consider it inclusive rather than exclusive or normative :)
More specifically, I think there are peaks and valleys in psychological health, and I don’t think the space I occupy is necessarily one of the highest peaks. But I would say that, regarding suffering or prolonged internal conflict, these measures feel pretty useful for determining two of the axes that point directionally at “health,” unless there’s a convincing argument that there are points in which more suffering or more internal conflict can be better, which I have yet to find convincing (and I suspect people who believe that would operationalize them differently than I would).
And yes, the reason I described the depressive episode the way I did was to indicate that I’ve only felt anything close to that due to life circumstances where the feelings were fairly legible and understandable! Six months of grief (or more) after someone dies is definitely not a sign of mental unhealth.
Ah, sorry that wasn’t clear! It’s not meant to specifically be an example of breaking things down into smaller steps, but rather a situation where, because it’s so simple, the useful step instead is positive visualization and attention on what each following step would result in.
Right, those words definitely seem more accurate to me!