[This is super rough]

[I’m pretty sure that there is prior work on this question that I don’t know about yet.]

Here’s a conversational pattern that I’ve noticed recently. I observed this specifically in conversations with my parents, but on further reflection, I do this too, and postulate that pretty much everyone does.

Basically, one person will say something, either sharing an opinion, or (maybe this is an atypical rationalist version?) sharing a fact, or something in between.

Then the other person will share an opinion or a fact that is at least somewhat related.

Basically the people go back and forth, sharing what they know about / what they think / what they’re interested in.

For instance, a few weeks ago, someone was telling me about how it wasn’t accidental that Hitler lost the war, which I agreed with, and I shared some anecdotes from my recent reading of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, particularly junctures where the NAZIs could have won the war if things had gone slightly differently (like if the Luftwaffe had continued bombing the areas in which the RAF command bunkers, from which they were using RADAR and radio to coordinate their planes, during the battle of Britain).

This may not be a great example, since I might have been making a point about historical contingency, and hindsight bias. I’m very confident that this pattern expressed itself in my most recent conversation with a friend to “catch up” though.

She would say something about something, and I would say something vaguely related.

(Ok. In both these cases, I had phenomenology of “desire to impress” and “pressure to show sophistication.” This is less evident in my conversations with my parents, but it isn’t implausible that there was a less vivid current of the same. That maybe the driving force of this weird thing.)

In any case, this conversational pattern is common, but it is particularly evident when talking with my parents, I’ll often share something, and (misunderstanding what I’m saying) will say something else that is only barely or vaguely related. (I think this might be offered as if it what is being said is in agreement with me.) This particular situation seems to highlight how much conversation is just an opportunity to share things that we want to talk about with someone else, who is likewise taking the opportunity to talk about things that they want to talk about.

What’s going on here? Why do we like doing this?

Some thoughts:

• Maybe we just like the feeling of being listened to, because it validates our opinions and perspectives. This is pretty interesting, given that it’s fake: the other person isn’t actually engaging with our opinions except to riff on them. It’s as if we’re masturbating each-other.
• Maybe this is about intelligence or sophistication signalling? We get to show off our thoughts?
• Maybe it’s a kind of bonding / tribe affirming thing: we pseudo agree with each-other’s propositions (without engaging with them critically)
• We just like talking about what we’re interested in for some reason, and the real question is why we like that.

It just hit me how the fact that this pandemic probably escaped from a lab in China means that this event, with global and personal consequences, is so contingent. There are other Everett branches where it didn’t happen, and I am going about my life as I would have.

I have a weight in my stomach about this. Especially in so far as the quarantine is good for me, and I am learning things or building skills / meta-skills that will have a permanent impact on my life, it is unsettling to think that they depend on fate. Am I going to be consistently less effective in those other worlds, because this “lucky” break didn’t happen? (Interestingly, that is the horrifying thing to me, not the thought of all the luck that I’ve missed out on that went to other worlds.) My growth and power is so fragile.

Of course there have been other events like this: WWII was contingent on Hitler’s birth, and that massively shaped the world I live in now. Most earths don’t look like this one for that reason. There’s still an intact European Jewry, the balance of power looks very different, and science may not have been institutionalized and may not be state-funded. How were Atomic bombs discovered in those world? How did the computer revolution happen?

And of course my personal life is incredibly contingent. If I hadn’t come across Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, would I be on a path of ambition? If I hadn’t gone to U Chicago, and met Stefan, would I have have even encountered LessWrong. Reading the sequences, at that time in my life, radically, radically transformed my trajectory.

But this is a huge contingent event occurring after I came into myself as a conscious entity, and after I had “gotten my footing” in the world. This pandemic has changed, and is apt to change a lot for me, but only by luck.

I think that this one stings in particular (at least in part) because, in principle I could have taken time and space to do the things that I’m doing now. But I predict that I wouldn’t have, unless forced. I can feel how that’s a bias. How across the multiverse, I’m less strong than I might otherwise be, because I’m not resisting that temptation. And here, I needed random chance to save me, instead of bootstrapping by my own power.

This is a reminder to me that I want to be an optimizer: I want to be the sort of thing that, whatever sort of universe it finds itself in, convergently steers that world towards the same state. Obviously, the worlds don’t actually converge, because of how much is determined by the randomness, and because I am small. But I want it to be the case that my situation defines the shape of the problems I have to solve, and the tools that I have to work with (and build myself from), but that my situation never sways my basic ability to steer.

I want to be the sort of thing that systematically moves in right direction, no matter where in the multiverse I find myself.

[Probably obvious to many (most?) of my readers, but the obvious often bears saying aloud.]

This morning, as part of my rest day, I did the first exercise of Claudia Altucher’s book, Become an Idea Machine, which is mostly a series of prompts for generating 10 (or more) new ideas, one prompt a day.

The first prompt is to take 10 complaints that you have, and for each one, turn it into a positive expression of gratitude. She gives the example of hating being stuck in traffic every day, and generating from that, “I am grateful that I live in a city that has so much traffic because that means there [are] plenty of opportunities here, and I can meet lots of interesting people.” You’re supposed to do this ten times, on your own problems.

I think that this is a great exercise. I imagine that I tend to be too rigid in my assessment of circumstances, and there are in fact a lot of good things resulting from a “problem”, which I fail to apprehend, because I’m stuck in my existing mindset. Done well, I think this mental motion shouldn’t feel like a self-trick, whereby you convince yourself that “the grapes were probably sour anyway.” Instead it feels like uncovering actual value, henceforth unnoticed, all around you.

As an example, my fourth most pressing problem is the lack of satisfying romantic partnership. And it is natural to focus on the pain or longing of that situation. But also, not having a partner means that I have a lot of solitary time, to think and work and do what I want, which I really value. By default, I think I wouldn’t notice how much I value that alone-time unless I did have a partner, at which point I might start to feel stifled. Hedonically, it seems like a bug if I only pay attention to the aspects of a situation that I dislike.

So I think appreciating what’s good about things that we might reflexively label as bad.

However, I think that it is crucial, if we want to be balanced and sane, that we not lose track of the problem being bad in this process.

It is right and good for the paraplegic to savor the way his disability forces him to slow down and be reflective, and “stop and smell the roses.” But that doesn’t mean that he can’t assess the situation, the pros and cons, and determine that on net, it would be better to be able to walk (and climb and run).

Likewise, it is extremely appropriate to look around at the way the recent pandemic has brought communities together, and the way that it has brought out heroism in many, and feel pleased and proud. But that doesn’t mean that we have to say that the pandemic is good, or that we shouldn’t wish that it hadn’t happened.

The claim “there is often unrecognized good in what seems to be bad” does not entail that “everything that seems bad is actually good”, (or the related “everything happens for a reason”). When we conflate the first with the second(s) them we’re  setting ourselves up for a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the present, a massive status quo bias.

There is more good in the world than we often appreciate by default. And the world is complex, and it is often hard to tell what the ultimate consequence of something will be. But that does not mean that we abdicate our sacred right to weigh up the pros and cons,  make the best assessment we can of whether a thing is good or bad, and then try to steer the world towards the good. When we do otherwise the consequences can be literally catastrophic.

(Of course this is not to say that everything that we reflexively consider bad is in fact bad on net. We might take something that we hate, consider all the benefits that it gives us and all the costs, and conclude that actually, our initial impression was wrong, and we on reflection, prefer the world with the supposed-to-be-bad thing. Just as we might reconsider our reflexive attitude to something that is supposed to be good, and conclude that on-net, we dis prefer it. [For instance, Brienne’s comment in this thread has had me reevaluating my attitude towards romantic love, lately.])

Despite often being maligned, the contemporary “spiritual” worldview has some things going for it. I emphasizes love, compassion, and gratitude, which are probably close to the most important thing to focus on for individual and community eudaimonia. (Though emphatically not for safely or sanely steering civilization.). New-agey types, despite their woo, do have a number of very effective tools, frameworks, and insights, like NVC, Focusing, and circling. The metaphysics is very confused, but metaphysics is really hard to get right (and if anything like panpsychism is true (which my inside view currently puts a lot more mass on than most of my peers), then they will turn out to have been not that far of the mark).

But, I suggest that the thing that is most wrong in the “spiritual” worldview is the general propensity to posit “things with intrinsic valence”. In my caricature of the spiritual worldview (which I more-or-less believed  from the ages of 15 to 20), many things (actions, energies, materials) are seen as fundamentally “good” and others as fundamentally “bad”, and that “good” things have good effects and “bad” things have bad effects.

• For instance, according to David Hawkins, meditation, prayer, optimistic thoughts, and positive emotions,  “raise your vibration“, attract good things into your life, and provokes peace locally, and across the world. (Negative thoughts, negative emotions, artificial supplements, etc.  lower your vibration.)
• Or, orgonite, which is a substance which is supposed to transmute “negative energy” into “positive energy.” Cellphone towers supposedly emit “negative orgon energy” (which “promote drought, negativity, fear, and so on”),
• “Toxins” is a sort of generic term for “bad things that are in your body”. You want to get rid of them.
• The phrases “good karma” and “bad karma” speak for themselves.

The list goes on and on. All of these invoke a sense of a thing that is good and safe vs. a thing that is bad and harmful. Obviously, you want more of the good, and less of the bad.

The problem is that almost nothing in the world seems to work like this. Things aren’t intrinsically bad or good. They just have effects. And whether those effects are good or bad depend on mechanistic details of the systems involved.

For example there is no substance that is fundamentally “healthy” or “unhealthy” for humans. The effects depend on the dosage, and location.

Air is obviously good for people, but an air bubble in the the blood stream can be fatal. Potassium is critical to the functioning of our neurons, but too much potassium disrupts that functioning, so we use potassium solutions as a lethal injection . Water is prototypically “good for you”, but drinking too much causes health problems and, of course, having water in your lungs is a good way to drown.

These substances aren’t fundamentally “bad.” The harm comes from too much of them in the wrong place.

I claim that (almost) everything works like this.

Facebook, or the internet, isn’t good or evil, it just has effects, some of which are positive and some of which are negative.

Smoking  will kill you, but its stimulant effects can boost your effective intelligence very slightly.

Even compassion and Christly forgiveness, are harmful in some systems.

The world is a bunch of complicated systems, and in order to get good effects, we don’t just mash the “good” button. Rather, we mostly need to figure out which precises elements go in exactly the right places.

More than a month ago, I started a new blog at https://efficacyengineering.wordpress.com/ .

I’m using it to document my personal development projects, as I build up complete, robust, systems for maintaining effective psychological states. That entails designing experiments, semi-rigorous analysis of results, phenomenological feature extraction, and brainstorming and debugging on the places where I’m stuck. Eventually, I might write up more permanent articles on that site, outlining the general psychological principles and mechanisms that underlie optimal learning and efficiency.

It is probably best thought of as a “productivity blog”, though for me, it is an research project in applied psychology.

I’m going to keep posting my thoughts on other topics to this blog, but from now on anything having to do with productivity or learning will go over there.