jimmy

Karma: 3,438

jimmy Mar 20, 2025, 6:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself
[...]
I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation.
This is what I’m talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It’s not just “here’s an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation”, it’s that it completely changes your meditation.
You notice that your third person “I should focus on the breath” is missing the point, and redirect to the first person perspective of “Sensations of breath are arising”, but in doing so you no longer even have a claim to the relevance of the breath. So now you have an experience of attending to sensation of breath for no reason, because of fairly handwavy third person reasons.
I’m pointing out that you can use meditation as practice for bringing more conscious awareness to your everyday life by bringing more conscious awareness to your practice of meditation itself. It’s a very different experience when you know in first person why what you’re attending to is the most interesting thing at the moment, and in third person knowing that you’re right to think this is what’s worth attending to.
That doesn’t mean you “give in” to first person perspectives and give up awareness of your third person perspective, just that you don’t give in to third person ideas either and give up or attempt to disconnect your first person perspective. It’s practicing being aware of both, and noticing when your behaviors don’t make sense according to your own perspectives.

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 11:16 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can’t sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.

What I would say is that untrained people don’t sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word “can” you’re claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we’re careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they “can’t” turns out to be false.
The difference between “trying to try” and “trying on the object level” can be the difference between struggling for months and succeeding in seconds.
I do not understand what you mean with “There can be though, if that’s what you want”. Do you mean “It’s possible to will/train yourself to have a coherent self”?

Something like that, yeah.

Like, you might want to go get Chinese food but not spend your money. Your desires for Chinese food and money are tugging you in different directions rather than in one coherent direction. But it’s possible to make up your mind and coherently want to pay for the Chinese food or else not want to eat it. You have to recognize that you can’t have the food without paying the money, and figure out which of your new options you prefer.
Do this enough, and you become relatively more coherent.

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 11:02 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.

Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn’t that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?

The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between “I want to focus on my breath” and “I am not focusing on my breath”.
Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through “really wanting to” [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you’re probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you’re currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I’m looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people’s claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don’t actually desire.
There’s no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let’s say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you’re making here.
One is that they’d be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace “focus on the breath” with “lift 500kg”, the answer to “Why aren’t you already lifting it, if that’s what you want?” is partly that you just can’t. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift—but there’d be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn’t at all look like “just not interested in lifting this weight”. I do think you’re physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it’s worth noting this requirement because failing because “can’t” is different than failing because “don’t wanna, so not really trying”.
Another is that “offering a lot of money” is enough to make them really want to do it. There’s no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think “should” motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you’ll get stronger results—the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall’s 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think “Yeah yeah, he’s just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music”—until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears—and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was “lifting a car off of [his] kids”. It’s not that he “couldn’t” lift 500kg in the gym, it’s that it wasn’t worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don’t get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they’ll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said “Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it”. Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.

How?
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of “I should do this, but I’m struggling to get myself to do it”, you notice that you don’t want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you’re asking for.

What happens if you don’t lift 500kg? You don’t get people saying “he broke a record”? Yeah, I guess that’s okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?

What happens if you don’t sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not “come up with rationalizations that sound plausible”, but moves you?

It’s easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 6:18 PM
11 points
8
on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
Some time ago, I realized that the perspective “I want to focus on the breath” is self-defeating. [...] The problem with “I should focus on the breath” is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving.
It often makes sense to talk about “I”. “I” makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.

”Should”, on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here.
You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren’t you already drawn to your breath, if that’s what you want to focus on?
Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they’re there is enough. If it’s not, then “I want to focus on the breath” is empirically shown to be false—so now you have a question of why you’re trying to force yourself to do a thing you don’t want to do.
The lack of “self language” when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I’m telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I’ll just eat or not eat. It’s not that there’s never any such thing as a “self” that has enough coherence to become a useful model, it’s that when you’re saying “I want to focus on my breath” and then choosing not to, there’s clearly no coherent self wanting to focus on those sensations.
There can be though, if that’s what you want.

jimmy Feb 13, 2025, 5:47 PM
2 points
0
on: Studies of Human Error Rate
Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human “understanding” as well!
“Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up” is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.

Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can’t “understand” something, I find it quite amusing that they’re almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.

jimmy Feb 10, 2025, 8:31 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: C’mon guys, Deliberate Practice is Real
My “c’mon guys” here is not “c’mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming.” It’s more like “look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on ‘object level work’ that doesn’t really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?”.
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is “do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?”)
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the “c’mon guys” thing, yet I don’t do my own separate “rationality practice”.
For me, it’s basically the same reason why I don’t spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I’m not against weight lifting in principle, and I’ve done a decent amount of it. It’s just that when I have a choice between “exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles” and “exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway”, the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it “two birds with one stone”, it also streamlines the process of making sure you’re training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn’t always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn’t have good feedback, or you’re not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn’t whether you’re doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you’re reflecting on your thinking in areas where there’s real feedback, and you’re noticing that feedback. I do think there’s a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there’s an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.

jimmy Feb 6, 2025, 9:01 AM
8 points
0
on: hypnosis question

1) Yes and no, depending on what you mean by “real thing”.
The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a giant tome of scientific knowledge on “hypnosis”; none of which suggests that it’s not real. Hypnotists really can do seemingly wild shit that most people cannot do. Most hypnotherapists like to say “It’s not mind control like Hollywood depicts”, but even that is only partially true. The lawyer Michael Fine used hypnosis to sexually assault his clients and give them amnesia for it, and he is in prison now only because he was dumb enough about it that his victims were able to notice that they were missing memory and that things didn’t add up. I’ve talked to victims of more clever hypnotists who haven’t gotten caught.

At the same time, there’s a reason hypnotists tend to write book with subtitles like “there’s no such thing as hypnosis”. I’d argue that it’s more accurate to say “there’s no such thing as not-hypnosis”, but neither really conveys an accurate understanding. The bottom line is that hypnosis isn’t what it appears to be, because “not hypnosis” isn’t what it appears to be, and once you get familiar with how to do hypnosis and see all the gray area between the black and white, the term kinda loses meaning. Competent hypnotists have a strong tendency to drop all the formalisms, and the most competent have a tendency to stop seeing what they do as “hypnosis”—at least, in my judge of competence as someone who also doesn’t see what I do as “hypnosis”.
2) Yes and no. I’ve gotten some interesting results using “self hypnosis”. One that stands out is using self hypnosis to “be comfortable” when I was seasick on a rocking boat one night. It worked, and I got comfortable—only to feel myself about to vomit anyway. Careful what you wish for.
The hard part isn’t “Can hypnosis be used to get my brain to believe X”, it’s what’s true? What’s worth doing? Are things going well, relative to the relevant expectations? The more you try to bullshit yourself, the more you’ll a) have unintended effects if you succeed, or b) foresee this and find it hard to get yourself to do self hypnosis. The more you see clearly what the right answer is, the less you’ll need hypnosis in the first place. The real value in learning hypnosis is as a proof of concept that allows you to see when you’re BSing yourself so you can stop that.

Due to the counter-intuitiveness and subtleties here, it’s hard to give a less cryptic short answer. I’m actually finishing up a ~20 post 65k word sequence on essentially this exact question. It’s about what I’ve learned about psychology and rationality as a result of picking up hypnosis in 2010. It will give concrete and actionable answers to what you’re looking for here, as well as the underlying justification. I have a draft done and basically waiting for a proof reader to make it through, then I’ll start posting.

jimmy Jan 27, 2025, 5:55 PM
2 points
0
on: The Clueless Sniper and the Principle of Indifference
There are several complications in the example you give, and I’m not sure which are intentional.
Let’s start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you’ve been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.

In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to nuke the whole earth, you center it on the bad guy and ignore the kid. If the terrorist will at most kill that one kid if you don’t kill him now, then you maximize expected value by biasing your distribution so that hitting the kid requires you to be further down the tail, and the ratio of terrorist/hostage hit goes up as the chance of a hit goes down. If the kid certainly dies if you miss, also dies if you hit him, and is only spared if you hit the terrorist, then you’re back to ignoring the kid and centering the distribution on the terrorist—even if you’re more likely to hit the kid than the terrorist.

In the scenario you describe, you don’t actually have the situation so well characterized. You’d be forced to lob bullets at a twenty degree inclination, without being able to use sights or see your target—among many other large uncertainties. In that case it’s not that you have a well known distribution and unknown result of the next draw. You don’t know what the distribution is. You don’t know what the meta distribution the distribution is being drawn from.

Statements like “more likely” are all relative to a model which you presuppose has some validity in context. What’s the model, and where do you think you’re getting the validity to say it? Even if the simulation God paused the game and spoke to you saying “I’ll run the experiment a billion times, and we’ll see if the kid gets hit more often”, you’d have no idea how to set up that experiment because you don’t know what you’re controlling for.

I’d guess that you’re asking about something in between, but I’m not sure which unknowns are intentional.

jimmy Jan 11, 2025, 7:29 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than “it doesn’t always happen” and yours sure don’t seem limited to “it doesn’t never happen”.
Here’s the motivating question for this whole essay:

You asked why people who “believe in” avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it
and here’s part of your conclusion

At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.
You’re talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that no, this is default. Any time people have to face anything as complex as sexuality, even if people are doing their best to pro-socially guide people this is necessarily what’s going to happen. Perversions can sneak in too, and I don’t deny that they exist, but postulating perversions is absolutely not needed in order to explain the data you’re seeking to explain.

To narrow things down a bit, we can return to the original comment:
Sometimes people profess or try to reveal a preference for X, as a response to coercive pressures that are specifically motivated by prior underlying preferences for anti-X. This is what I’m calling preference inversion.

I don’t disagree with this.

My intuition is that generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences. I don’t know whether there are other sorts of analogous distorting factors nearly all reasonable people would not like to satisfy upon reflection, but in general, I’m using the term “intrinsic preferences” to refer to whatever’s left over after all such generally appealing adjustments.

It’s this second part I was taking issue with.
Here, you’re talking about what generally happens, not what “sometimes” happens, and I don’t think “intrinsic preferences” is defined well enough to do what you want it to do here. I don’t think it can be, unless you introduce more concepts, because I don’t think “external vs intrinsic” can do justice to this multidimensional space no matter how you cleave it.
Part of this is because what counts as “external” cannot be well defined. If daddy yells at me to not drink, that sounds external, and my revealed preferences are likely to revert when he’s not looking. But maybe being a reasonable person, upon reflection I’d agree with him. Does that make it “not a preference inversion”? If my boss threatens to fire me if I show up drunk, that sounds external too. But that’s not very different than my boss reminding me that he can only afford to hire productive people—and that’s starting to sound like “just reality”. Certainly if a doctor tells me that my liver is failing, that sounds like “just reality” and “internal”. But it’s external to my brain, and maybe if someone offers me an artificial liver I’d revert to my “intrinsic preferences”?
Our preferences necessarily depend on the reality we find ourselves embedded in, and cannot exist in isolation except perhaps in the highest abstraction (e.g. “I prefer to continue existing” or something), so the concept of “intrinsic preferences” for concrete things necessarily falls apart. What doesn’t fall apart is the structure of incoherence in our own preferences.
We’re constantly trying to shape and reshape the reality that others live in such that their revealed preferences given this reality satisfy our own. Part of this is making laws forbidding theft, how we indoctrinate in church, our hiring and firing decisions, how we inform our friends, etc. Some of these actions are purely cooperative, others are pure defections, and many are somewhere in between. Often we have fairly superficial pressure applied which results in fairly superficial changes in revealed preferences which easily revert, but that superficiality is fundamentally a property of the person containing the preferences not the person applying the pressures. There is indeed skill in facilitating deeper shifts in preferences to better match reality, and this is indeed a good thing to pursue, but the “intrinsic vs external” binary obscures the interplay between shifting reality, shifting perceptions of reality, and shifting preferences—and therefore most of what is going on.
To use your example, the positive value of marital intimacy is inherently intertwined with the power of sexuality, the importance of getting sexuality right, and therefore the badness of sexuality done inappropriately. There is all sorts of room for this guidance to be given skillfully or clumsily, purely or corruptly, for it to be received coherently or superficially, in concordance with reality or not, and everywhere in between. Like you’ve noticed, there isn’t always a legible distinction between the conventional conservative Christians who pull this off well and those that do more poorly.
My own perception, is that almost none of our preferences can be cleanly described as “intrinsic” or “externally pressured”, or as “valid” or “invalid”. There’s just differing degrees of coherence and differing degrees of fit to reality. The average case of conventional conservative Christians pushing against non-marital sex, and the average case of the person “believing in” and regretting not living by their “beliefs”, is in between the picture Christianity portrays, and the one you portray of falsified preferences. Because the ground truth is in between “nonmarital sex is always bad” and “nonmarital sex is always as good as it seems”.
Generally, when I interact with people on the topic of sexuality, I see people who don’t know what their preferences resolve to with regards to non-marital sex—and whose genuine preferences would resolve in different ways depending on the culture they’re embedded within and the opportunities they have. I could sell either picture, and make it look “intrinsic”, if I’m willing to sweep the right things under the rug in order to do so. Most people’s belief structures surrounding sex (and most things) are shoddily built. I could argue for their destruction, and destroy them. I could argue for their utility, and preserve them. The optimal solution necessarily involves seeing both the utility and imperfections, both a degree of destruction and of reconstruction.
Like you said, this isn’t just theoretical. This is a thing I’ve actually done when it has come up. I can give examples if it’d help

jimmy Jan 9, 2025, 8:09 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
Agreed in full

jimmy Jan 8, 2025, 6:17 PM
11 points
9
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
The problem there isn’t the Econ-101, it’s the fool in the arm chair.
You can’t just say “I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors”, because that’s not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That’s entirely consistent with Econ-101.
Or maybe they aren’t productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. That’s also entirely consistent with Econ-101.
If we have situations that look like “This person didn’t want it”+”this person is productive enough to earn their wage”, then if we also have Econ-101 we notice a contradiction. We can’t just assume the bottom line that Econ-101 is somehow wrong without finding an identifiable error and be justified in our assumptions. Neither can we assume people will necessarily do what’s in their best interest and assume “This person wanted it, actually”, without finding an identifiable error in the perception that they didn’t.
There’s an actual puzzle to be solved here, and we can’t write the bottom line first and also get to the right answer on anything but chance.

jimmy Jan 8, 2025, 6:01 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they’re so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.
I don’t teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.
At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don’t want our children to grow up with sexual shame that continues into marriage, but if the kindergarten teacher starts teaching kids about how great sex is and offering to show them, then do you take a stance of “well, I don’t want my five year old to think sex is bad...” or do you say “Absolutely not.”?
Information sharing and force are both useful tools, and while it’s better to lean on the former as much as possible it is important to be able to fall back on the latter. People just don’t have a good idea of how to do the former (and are kinda ‘sinful’ themselves) so they over-rely on the latter.
Using force (including social shame) is a symmetric weapon so it is more easily (even unintentionally) corrupted into serving less pure motivations, but it also serves pure motivations when necessary.
The question of “Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts?” is important, but messy.

Which people? Which pressure? If I know two people who grew up in Christian households, and one of them grew up in a strict household, married a virgin and is happy and without sexual shame, and another grew up in a less strict household and had premarital sex but felt bad about it, then how do we judge Christianities “anti sex” norms here?
I’d say we can notice which are more effective at bringing about good outcomes, and which have more pure intent and are heavier on the information to pressure ratio. But we cannot separate them. I know some people who absolutely reject the pressure—and then come to learn on their own the value it was pointing at—and other people who are handled delicately with pure information and then shame themselves for not learning to like sweets in the optimal way instantly.

It’s kinda a mess.

jimmy Jan 8, 2025, 5:37 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
You’re arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it’s not a “good faith attempt”, but as a general rule people don’t know how to do any better than this.
It’s true that people can appeal to “sinfully delicious” to sell you their dessert, but why don’t broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If “Sinful” means “good”, actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn’t everything “sinful”?
The answer is that it didn’t originate with salesmen. Dessert salesmen are leaning on the preexisting “Anything that feels this good must be a sin”, so the question is where that came from. One obvious explanation is that things that feel that good tend to be pursued a lot, and there are contexts in which those pursuits are less desirable than it may seem.
I do withhold sweets (and television) when I have the intuition that he’s asking for them for the wrong reasons, in a confused way, and won’t either get what he wants from them or learn efficiently from the experience.
Even you notice that he will ask for sweets for the wrong reasons and that you don’t always expect him to learn efficiently from experience. That’s where the pressure to coerce your kid into eating less sweets comes from.
You’re smarter and wiser than most, and so you’re able to teach your kid these things more effectively and with transmission of neuroses, and that’s great. I try at that as well, and have noticed some of the same things (though not all; I’ll have to play with the ‘appetizer’ bit).
I’m not arguing that the things you’re pointing at don’t exist, just pointing at the fact that people don’t know how to do any better. We can flip the sign on this and look at how people handle teaching their kids about getting their shots at the doctor. People want their kids to be okay with it because it’s an “anti-sin” in that it in reality it is better than it feels. That’s why they try to tell kids “It’s okay! It just feels like a little pinch!”

And these attempts are equally counterproductive, because as a general rule people don’t know how to avoid teaching their own neuroses. I told my two year old that shots are bad and scary and that I was too scared so she needed to go first. She had fun showing me how to be brave, and only cried when she couldn’t get a second shot.
The next year, she watched some cartoon made by incompetent but well meaning people that was aimed at showing kids that shots are okay, and relearned a fear of needles. Because all these people know how to teach is their own perspective, and that perspective is “Needles are terrifying but we mustn’t admit it because we need to get our shots”. So I had to start over.
As a society we notice things. We just suck at teaching them, and even our most good faith attempts are still counterproductively coercive and lacking in actionable information.

jimmy Jan 6, 2025, 12:02 AM
5 points
1
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: Preference Inversion
Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both “not be ill e.g. with diabetes” and “eat tasty things”.
That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I’m pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like “liver treats”.
Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.
I think that’s right, but also “more distance to failure” doesn’t help so much if you use your newfangled automobile to cover that distance more quickly. It’s easier to avoid failure, but also easier to fail. A gun makes it easier to defend yourself, and also requires you to grow up until you can make those calls correctly one hundred percent of the time. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
I’ll take the car, and the gun, and the society that trusts people with cars and guns and other technologically enabled freedoms. But only because I think we can aspire to such responsibilities, and notice when they’re not met. All the enabling with none of the sobering fear of recklessness isn’t a combination I’m a fan of.

With respect to the “why do you believe this” question on my previous comment about promiscuity being statistically linked with marital dissatisfaction, I’m not very good at keeping citations on hand so I can’t tell you which studies I’ve seen, but here’s what chatgpt found for me when I asked for studies on the correlation.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600089
https://unews.utah.edu/u-researcher-more-sex-partners-before-marriage-doesnt-necessarily-lead-to-divorce/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/testing-common-theories-on-the-relationship-between-premarital-sex-and-marital-stability
https://www.proquest.com/openview/46b66af73b830380aca0e6fbc3b597e3/1

I don’t actually lean that hard on the empirical regularity though, because such things are complicated and messy (e.g. the example I gave of a man with a relatively high partner count succeeding because he took an anti-promiscuous stance). The main reason I believe that pills don’t remove all the costs of promiscuity is that I can see some of the causal factors at work and have experience actually working with them to help women land happy stable relationships.

jimmy Jan 4, 2025, 8:50 PM
16 points
3
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I object to the framing of society being all-wise,
Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks “Trying heroin seems like a good idea”, and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it’s the most important thing in the universe.
Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I’d bet on “both” before either.
Consequently, I’d prefer “bunch of candy and no diabetes still” outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done.
This isn’t the eating your cake and having it too that you think it is.
Yes, computers allow us to do things we couldn’t do before, and that’s great. Before, you might have to choose between meeting with Bob in the north or Richard in the south, and technology enables you to have both. Great!
The thing is, neither meeting Bob nor Richard is a “sin”. It’s not a “thing you will be tempted to do due to shallow preferences” where society recognizes that those preferences are shallow and predictably lead to bad outcomes. Society wasn’t all up in your business decisions telling you who to meet because it didn’t trust you to make the obviously right one; that was on you.
Candy gluttony, like heroin use, is a sin. It’s something that society knows is bad news, but will feel like good news to individuals, because individuals are myopic and lack the bigger picture. If you had lived a million lifetimes, and thrown away your life to heroin thousands of times, heroin wouldn’t be so tempting because you’d know from experience that heroin ain’t great. But you haven’t, so you don’t, and society has some wisdom to offer individuals here.
Candy consumption is the same thing, scaled down a little bit. You’re not after the calories, the micronutrients, or anything real in the candy itself. You’re after how it makes you feel. You’re after the feeling of getting what you want, without thought about whether you want the right thing. In other words, you’re wire-heading.
Pills that reduce the consequences for “sins”—whether candy consumption, or heroin consumption, or nonmarital sex—can be good. If you’re going to die from syphilis because you were too dumb to listen to society, having some forgiveness can certainly be a good thing, and maybe you’ll learn your lesson instead of just dying.
But if you think “Syphilis is treatable!” justifies all nonmarital sex, then you’re gonna need a new type of pill soon.
And if you think that once you have BC then now all nonmarital sex is justified, then you’re on track for a statistically less happy marriage.
It’s not that options aren’t often good, or even that options which reduce consequence of sin aren’t good. I’m also not arguing that antibiotics and birth control don’t open up options for good nonmarital sex, or that no one is with it enough to be able to reliably find them. Some people are; maybe you’re one of them.
But technology is not a good alternative to good decision making and informed values. Waiting around for technology that doesn’t exist yet instead of learning more about what is good now is a mistake. You get better results by learning what is good than by relying on technological crutches, and the way that this happens will often be difficult to foresee.
As an amusing anecdote relating to this, one of the more sexually successful men I know decided that he was no longer going to have sex with anyone but his future wife—whom he had not yet met. I called bullshit, and bet him $100. Not long after he made that bet, I saw his disinterest in non-future-wife sex turn a “I like you and would have sex with you” level of attraction into a “I will do whatever it takes to marry you” level of attraction. It’s hard to even conceptualize such moves from a shallow pleasure seeking mindset, and impossible to enact them. And yet, I’m quite confident that he wouldn’t have been able to marry her otherwise, and that his alternative sex life would have been much worse even from a superficial pleasure seeking perspective. It’s hard to do justice to so briefly, but that was a very strong move that led to a great marriage which wouldn’t have worked otherwise, and no amount of technological crutches would have gotten him to where he is today.
that seems already solved with the concept of “commitment”?
You mean like… marriage? :p
In all seriousness, I’m not taking a “in marriage only!” stance here.
The success story I give above involved sex outside marriage as an active ingredient in more than one way, and could be used to argue against a strict “in marriage only!” stance. At the same time, it demonstrates value of “in marriage only” which has been lost in what the norm has become.
He was able to thread that needle and get unusually good results because he had both respect for and an understanding of traditional “in marriage only”, and a strong enough rebellious streak to not let himself be bound by forces he didn’t agree with. You can’t get those results without respect for traditional wisdom, and neither can you get it by becoming slave to some pastor’s clumsy interpretation of them.

jimmy Jan 3, 2025, 8:49 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Preference Inversion
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I’m saying. It’s not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it’s also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
“Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure” is very difficult to actually measure, so it’s more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong—especially since “absence of coercive pressure” can’t actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we’re going to include in our hypothetical.

jimmy Jan 3, 2025, 7:34 PM
37 points
12
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I don’t think it’s so simple at all.
If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don’t think that’s a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of “something more”), but it certainly doesn’t work for all preferences and it’s generally not so clear.
Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
So which preferences are “real”? The preference for candy or the preference for no candy and no diabetes? What you are calling “intrinsic preferences” is often just shallow preferences, which haven’t yet been trained to reflect nuances of reality like “more of a good thing isn’t always better” and “here’s where it’s good and here’s where it’s not good”. There’s preferences declared, preferences acted on, and preferences that will be regressed to in absence of guiding pressure. The declared preferences are generally going to align better with the coercive forces than the preferences that will be regressed to in absence of said pressure, but the preferences acted on can easily be more reflectively stable than those regressed to—because all that takes is for the culture to be wiser than the individual, and the individual to not have caught up yet.
Returning to the case of nonmarital sex, of course it feels good—just like candy feels good. There is something there that we need (namely “sex”, and “calories”), but the question is over whether naïve indulgence across all contexts will result in blowing past Goodhart’s warnings into more harm than good, and whether the “oppressive society” is actually forming you into a closer approximation of the reflectively sensible thing to do.
Societies pressures can end up perverted, but individual’s intrinsic preferences start out perverted. Who is closer to reflectively stable, society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets, or the kid who wants to eat all the sweets? Society who aggressively shames nonmarital sex, or the teenager who wants to bone everyone?
As we mature, our desires change, and the degree to which reversion in absence of external pressures brings us closer to something truly reflectively stable depends on how much we’ve learned to separate overconsumption of sweets from appropriate consumption of sweets, and overconsumption of nonmarital sex to appropriate consumption. I think the answer depends too much on the specific (sub)culture and the specific individual at a specific time in their life to make any sweeping generalizations.

jimmy Dec 31, 2024, 7:27 PM
7 points
0
on: Began a pay-on-results coaching experiment, made $40,300 since July
What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?
1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren’t working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?
2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and how many times did you bail? There’s some ambiguity here, but probably manageable. If you don’t expect to hear back (e.g. because it’s been two months), then count it as a bail. If you suggest that their problem isn’t in your wheel house and they say “okay” rather than asking to try anyway, I’d count that one as on you.
3) To what extent have you “failed” because the initial goal turned out to be meaningfully mis-specified? E.g. someone wants to be more socially active in a certain group, only to realize their aversion to socializing in that group is actually well grounded, and they no longer want to achieve their initial goal?
4) To what extent have you caused problems by being too successful for the specified goal? E.g. The person actually ends up active in that social circle before realizing that they’ve been wasting their time doing so. Or maybe you help someone be more secure and they’re happy for it, but it did lead to them losing a relationship when they spoke a little too freely.

jimmy Dec 30, 2024, 1:27 AM
5 points
−1
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
I think there’s not much to update. “Exploitation” is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag ‘unfair’ as well: Again, I’m simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.
This is where I disagree. I don’t think it is simple, partly because I don’t think “unfair” is simple. People’s perceptions of what is “unfair”, like people’s perceptions of anything else that means anything at all, can be wrong. If you better inform people and notice that their perceptions of what is “fair” changes, then you have to start keeping track of the distinction between “people’s econ101 illiterate conceptions of fairness” and “the actual underlying thing that doesn’t dissolve upon clear seeing”.
For example, if we have a pie and we ask someone to judge if it’s fair to split it two ways and give the third person no pie, then that person might say it’s an unfair distribution because the fair distribution is ¹⁄₃,1/3,1/3. But then if we inform the judge that the third person was invited to help make the pie and declined to do so while the other people did all the work, then all of a sudden that ¹⁄₃,1/3,1/3 distribution starts to look less fair and more like a naïve person’s view of what fairness is. The aversion isn’t defined away, it dissolves once you realize that it was predicated on nonsense.
Another reason I don’t think it’s simple is because I don’t think “exploitation” is just something people are just “unhappy about”. It’s a blaming thing. If I say you’re exploiting me, that’s an accusation of wrongdoing, and a threat of getting you lynched if people side with me strongly enough and you don’t cave to the threats. I claim that if you say “exploitation is happening, but it’s no one’s fault and the employers aren’t doing anything morally wrong” then you’re doing something very different than what other people are doing when they talk about exploitation.
If there’s a situation where a bunch of poor orphans are employed for 50c per grueling 16 hour work day plus room and board, then the fact that it might be better than starving to death on the street doesn’t mean it’s as great as we might wish for them. We might be sad about that, and wish they weren’t forced to take such a deal. Does that make it “exploitation?” in the mind of a lot of people, yeah. Because a lot of people never make it further than “I want them to have a better deal, so you have to give it to them”—even if it turns out they’re only creating 50.01c/day worth of value, the employer got into the business out of the goodness of his heart, and not one of the people crying “exploitation!” cares enough about the orphans to give them a better deal or even make they’re not voting them out of a living. I’d argue that this just isn’t exploitation, and anyone thinking it is just hasn’t thought things through.
On the other hand, if an employer demands sexual favors from his poor young woman employees, that rubs us the wrong way morally in a way that is easier to square with Econ 101. For one, if he’s not demanding sexual favors from his male or ugly female employees, it suggests that maybe the work they do is enough to pay them for, and if we collectively say “Hey knock it off. You can’t demand sexual favors from your employees” he might keep employing them and giving them a better deal. Maybe “this guy is doing something wrong by demanding sexual favors” actually holds up in a way that “this guy is doing something morally wrong by paying market wages” does not.
I think “what validity is left in our concept of ‘exploitation’ once we realize that people can’t be obligated to pay whatever wage we’d like to close our eyes and believe is fair?” is a nontrivial question.

jimmy Dec 27, 2024, 7:31 PM
4 points
−4
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
that the elephant in the room is that the rich should help the poor independently of the question of the labor exchange itself, i.e. that the overwhelming moral point is that, if we care, we should simply donate some of our resources.
“Should” is a red flag word, which serves to hide the facets of reality that generate sense of obligation. It helps to taboo it, and find out what’s left.
If a rich person wants to help the poor, it will be more effective so simply help the poor—i.e. with some of their own resources. Trying to distort the market leads to smaller gains from trade which could be used to help the poor. So far so good.
If someone else want’s the rich person to help the poor with the rich person’s resources, then with what will this rich person be motivated? If the goodness of their own hearts is enough, then this “someone else” is irrelevant, and not in the picture. If the rich person is to be motivated by gains from trade with someone else, then great. However, this is equivalent to the trade partners demanding more of the surplus and then donating it themselves, so again we’re out of luck.
If we’re talking about obligating the rich person to spend their resources on poor people, then they’re de facto not the rich person’s resources anymore, and we’re distorting the market by force in order to get there. Now we have to deal with unfree trade and the lack of gains from trade that we could have had.
We can’t just say “they coexist, no problem!”, because to the extent that they’re different frameworks we can’t have both. You can have free trade and acknowledge exploitation only if you accept that exploitation is totally fine and fair—at which point you’re redefining the word “exploitation”. The moment you try to stop someone from a kind of exploitation that can coexist with free trade, you’re trying to stop free trade, with all the consequences of that.
That’s not to say we have to give up on caring about all exploitation and just do free trade, but it does mean that if we want to have both we have to figure out how to update our understanding of exploitation/economics until the two fit.