Opinion

Don’t Overdose Locally Beneficial Changes

​[Alternative title: apply More Dakka incrementally and carefully.]If you are very overweight, then you should aim to cut down your daily caloric intake. This doesn’t mean your optimal daily caloric intake is 100kcal.If you are very underweight, then you should aim to ramp up your daily caloric intake. This doesn’t mean your optimal daily caloric intake is 10,000kcal.In general, if something is good to do some amount in some context, this doesn’t mean that you should go as all-in on it as you can possibly manage. The utility of a change is context-dependent, and as you apply more of the change, the context also changes, and the marginal utility of the change might change along with the changed context (up or down)….This seems dead obvious, but I’ve been noticing various places to which this dead obvious point applies, but where many people seem to apply “seems good so far, so let’s go all in” regardless.For example: It’s good to pull the mind’s brakes, but it doesn’t mean it’s good to just stop it.Some currents of thought latch onto the fact that certain changes to one’s mind are clearly generally mostly beneficial and extrapolate maximally, proclaiming that the state of mind that got modified maximally along this axis is the most desirable one.moridinamael writes:About a decade ago I meditated for an hour a day every day for a few weeks, then sat down to breakfast with my delightful (at the time) toddlers and realized that I felt nothing. There was only the perfect crystalline clarity and spaciousness of total emotional detachment. “Oh,” I said, and never meditated again….Young adults should probably put some effort into becoming less emotionally reactive. Being volatile makes you unpleasant to be around, and undercuts your ability to achieve pretty much any goals you may have. If you have any traumas, it’s likely positive-EV for you to devote time and energy to learning some kind of therapy modality with a good evidence base, and then taking the time to resolve those issues.In my opinion – for most people – once you have fixed about 60% of your emotional reactivity and 90% of your psychological triggers, you have hit a point of diminishing returns. In fact, past that point, I think further investment in making yourself “nonreactive” and “unattached,” and removing all minor triggers from your psyche, is pathological from the perspective of actually trying to be happy and to do things with your life.Last year, I interacted with a practitioner of Buddhism who expressed a strange view to me, which I am now able to only vaguely recall. As far as I remember, the view was that as humans interact with each other, other living beings, and even the rest of the general non-living world around them, they are not passively allowing things to manifest themselves as they are, but rather imposing certain concepts on the Other, fitting the Other into preconceived frames. This is bad, the person said, because it puts us in “conflict” with the world.[1] The right choice is to abandon all our concepts, as they are “violent”. If abandoning all the concepts means annihilation of the mind, so be it.Listening to people trying to make sense of this after the Buddhist’s departure made me think that this is an example of a broad pattern where someone notices a good mental movement or a change to one’s mind and goes on to (implicitly) consider it absolutely good and something that is to be applied all the way.One can gain insight, through various sorts of practice, that getting one’s concepts to loosen their grip on the world, and letting the world manifest itself through the cracks left by the loosening of those concepts, can be good. See: Naturalism, Seeing with Fresh Eyes, Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality,[2] etc. This doesn’t mean that you can just abandon all your concepts[3] because, in order to perceive in the first place, you need some concepts to make sense of the incoming information. A blank slate is not a mind.[Caveat: I’m not saying that all Buddhist-ish practice is bad, and I am not claiming that this is the view that Buddha (or whatever specific major figure in the movement) held.]To give a few more examples:Escalating polarization: Someone who latches onto a locally promising idea that can explain a bunch of stuff well becomes a hedgehog who can perceive the world but through the lenses of this idea.Post-rationality: I haven’t hung out much in explicitly post-rationality circles, but my limited experience supports the view that it starts with someone noticing that the [LW!rationalist worldview as often practiced] has important limitations or missing nuance, and then they go on to abandon many of the beneficial parts, e.g., sacrificing clarity of thought and empiricism for the sake of vibes.”AI is finally generally useful now, so let’s integrate it into everything in our company, even if it doesn’t make sense, once you think about it for 5 minutes.”Climate activism: “We should be doing much more to mitigate/stop/manage climate change because the consequences will be bad.” over time developed into “We should be doing nearly everything that can be done to mitigate/stop/manage climate change because the consequences will be the worst things ever.”.In response to this and “degrowth”, someone may go e/acc and advocate for a hawk-y economy. 9/11:One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.These were my first three thoughts, in order:I guess I really am living in the Future.Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear.and thenThe overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.The above is an excerpt from Eliezer’s old post When None Dare Urge Restraint. The issue I’m pointing at is something like: non-dare-urge-restraint-ness dynamics can also occur intra-personally.[4]^One of the things I asked the person was “Why call it ‘conflict’, rather than ‘tension’, which is like a clearly more apt term to me, because it’s unclear to me that this needs to lead to any conflict, whereas there is some tension between, roughly, bottom-up processing and top-down processing, although it’s unclear to me why this would be a proper tension between the perceiver and the perceived?”. As far as I could tell, the person didn’t offer a response.^In a sense, the entire point of this post could be described as “positive evaluation of an available action can become a trapped prior, and the consequences of it can be catastrophic”.^I guess a better term than “concepts” would be something like “mental structures”, but I’ll limit esotericism by sticking to the more common term.^Maybe it makes sense to think about it in terms of myopic subagent power-seeking, a cancerous sort of goal (speculating, low confidence).Discuss ​Read More

​[Alternative title: apply More Dakka incrementally and carefully.]If you are very overweight, then you should aim to cut down your daily caloric intake. This doesn’t mean your optimal daily caloric intake is 100kcal.If you are very underweight, then you should aim to ramp up your daily caloric intake. This doesn’t mean your optimal daily caloric intake is 10,000kcal.In general, if something is good to do some amount in some context, this doesn’t mean that you should go as all-in on it as you can possibly manage. The utility of a change is context-dependent, and as you apply more of the change, the context also changes, and the marginal utility of the change might change along with the changed context (up or down)….This seems dead obvious, but I’ve been noticing various places to which this dead obvious point applies, but where many people seem to apply “seems good so far, so let’s go all in” regardless.For example: It’s good to pull the mind’s brakes, but it doesn’t mean it’s good to just stop it.Some currents of thought latch onto the fact that certain changes to one’s mind are clearly generally mostly beneficial and extrapolate maximally, proclaiming that the state of mind that got modified maximally along this axis is the most desirable one.moridinamael writes:About a decade ago I meditated for an hour a day every day for a few weeks, then sat down to breakfast with my delightful (at the time) toddlers and realized that I felt nothing. There was only the perfect crystalline clarity and spaciousness of total emotional detachment. “Oh,” I said, and never meditated again….Young adults should probably put some effort into becoming less emotionally reactive. Being volatile makes you unpleasant to be around, and undercuts your ability to achieve pretty much any goals you may have. If you have any traumas, it’s likely positive-EV for you to devote time and energy to learning some kind of therapy modality with a good evidence base, and then taking the time to resolve those issues.In my opinion – for most people – once you have fixed about 60% of your emotional reactivity and 90% of your psychological triggers, you have hit a point of diminishing returns. In fact, past that point, I think further investment in making yourself “nonreactive” and “unattached,” and removing all minor triggers from your psyche, is pathological from the perspective of actually trying to be happy and to do things with your life.Last year, I interacted with a practitioner of Buddhism who expressed a strange view to me, which I am now able to only vaguely recall. As far as I remember, the view was that as humans interact with each other, other living beings, and even the rest of the general non-living world around them, they are not passively allowing things to manifest themselves as they are, but rather imposing certain concepts on the Other, fitting the Other into preconceived frames. This is bad, the person said, because it puts us in “conflict” with the world.[1] The right choice is to abandon all our concepts, as they are “violent”. If abandoning all the concepts means annihilation of the mind, so be it.Listening to people trying to make sense of this after the Buddhist’s departure made me think that this is an example of a broad pattern where someone notices a good mental movement or a change to one’s mind and goes on to (implicitly) consider it absolutely good and something that is to be applied all the way.One can gain insight, through various sorts of practice, that getting one’s concepts to loosen their grip on the world, and letting the world manifest itself through the cracks left by the loosening of those concepts, can be good. See: Naturalism, Seeing with Fresh Eyes, Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality,[2] etc. This doesn’t mean that you can just abandon all your concepts[3] because, in order to perceive in the first place, you need some concepts to make sense of the incoming information. A blank slate is not a mind.[Caveat: I’m not saying that all Buddhist-ish practice is bad, and I am not claiming that this is the view that Buddha (or whatever specific major figure in the movement) held.]To give a few more examples:Escalating polarization: Someone who latches onto a locally promising idea that can explain a bunch of stuff well becomes a hedgehog who can perceive the world but through the lenses of this idea.Post-rationality: I haven’t hung out much in explicitly post-rationality circles, but my limited experience supports the view that it starts with someone noticing that the [LW!rationalist worldview as often practiced] has important limitations or missing nuance, and then they go on to abandon many of the beneficial parts, e.g., sacrificing clarity of thought and empiricism for the sake of vibes.”AI is finally generally useful now, so let’s integrate it into everything in our company, even if it doesn’t make sense, once you think about it for 5 minutes.”Climate activism: “We should be doing much more to mitigate/stop/manage climate change because the consequences will be bad.” over time developed into “We should be doing nearly everything that can be done to mitigate/stop/manage climate change because the consequences will be the worst things ever.”.In response to this and “degrowth”, someone may go e/acc and advocate for a hawk-y economy. 9/11:One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.These were my first three thoughts, in order:I guess I really am living in the Future.Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear.and thenThe overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.The above is an excerpt from Eliezer’s old post When None Dare Urge Restraint. The issue I’m pointing at is something like: non-dare-urge-restraint-ness dynamics can also occur intra-personally.[4]^One of the things I asked the person was “Why call it ‘conflict’, rather than ‘tension’, which is like a clearly more apt term to me, because it’s unclear to me that this needs to lead to any conflict, whereas there is some tension between, roughly, bottom-up processing and top-down processing, although it’s unclear to me why this would be a proper tension between the perceiver and the perceived?”. As far as I could tell, the person didn’t offer a response.^In a sense, the entire point of this post could be described as “positive evaluation of an available action can become a trapped prior, and the consequences of it can be catastrophic”.^I guess a better term than “concepts” would be something like “mental structures”, but I’ll limit esotericism by sticking to the more common term.^Maybe it makes sense to think about it in terms of myopic subagent power-seeking, a cancerous sort of goal (speculating, low confidence).Discuss ​Read More

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