Keep Your Identity Large

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

In his famous essay Keep Your Identity Small, Paul Graham argues that the reason arguments about religion, politics, and programming languages get so heated is that they’re parts of a person’s identity. It isn’t just about the merits of this or that policy or this or that programming language, it’s about who you are as a person. Therefore, he suggests, to be less stupid, avoid identifying as anything: be “a person who uses Lisp sometimes” rather than “a Lisp programmer.”

I disagree.

The problem is that, as Sarah Constantin writes:

Dasein [identity] is what you do when you assert what it means to be human, what it means to be you, what it means to be a member of your community.  Dasein is self-definition.  And, in particular, self-definition with respect to a social context. Where do I fit in society? Who is my tribe? Who am I relative to other people? What’s my type?

These are really basic psychological needs for a lot of people. As Sarah writes later, identity is about self-expression, self-definition, self-assertion. Of course, not everyone shares these needs: not everyone needs to know who they are and where they fit into the social fabric. There are a lot of different kinds of minds. But having a self-model, a sense of yourself, is a legitimate need for many people.

Of course, if you have that need, and you try to eliminate your sense of identity, your brain isn’t just going to let you go about not having a basic psychological need filled. Probably you’re going to have an identity anyway, you’re just not going to be consciously aware that you have it. And that means you can’t take any steps to compensate for the ways your identity might be biasing you. You can’t take a step back and say “hey, I know I get emotional about programming languages because I identify as a Lisp programmer, so I should take a step back and deliberately notice the good parts of this other heathen programming language.” Instead, you just say “Lisp is the best language for all purposes! You should believe me because I don’t have an identity as a Lisp programmer so I’m objective!”

It is always dangerous to have a self-image as being objective, because all too often one acquires the self-image before one acquires the objectivity.

Of course, the criticisms Graham says still apply: if people’s identities are getting wrapped up in an argument, it’s really hard to have the argument in a remotely civil and enlightening way. So how do we minimize the harm of having an identity while still getting the benefits?

Identify as things that aren’t based on empirical claims. If you identify as a libertarian, then you’re signing on to a bunch of empirical claims, like “the minimum wage is bad for poor people” and “environmental regulations cause more harm than good” and “police officers abuse people’s civil liberties.” If it turns out that actually police officers are totally nice to black people everywhere, this might be a threat to your identity as a libertarian, and then you’re going to have flamewars about the subject.

Compare this to an identity as a baker. I am really having a hard time thinking of empirical claims related to being a baker. “Bread is yummy”? “It is a good use of one’s time to knead things”? “Being paleo is maybe a bad idea and maybe a reason for creativity in the use of gluten-free flours”? But “baker” serves all the same purposes of self-definition (you are a person who can make really delicious cakes) and understanding oneself within a social context (you are a person who feeds people such as Ozy delicious cake). A baker self-identity is free epistemically.

Identify as things you want to preserve. Many effective altruists are concerned about values drift. They start out valuing altruism, become an investment banker so they can donate more money, and wind up valuing $300 sushi dinners and designer ties. Fortunately, identity tends to keep things fixed. That’s awful for facts– you want to be convinced by new evidence– but great for values– you want to keep your own values and not other people’s. Therefore, it can be useful to identify as an altruist, or an artist, or a family man, or an ambitious person, or a hedonist, or some other value you wish to preserve.

There’s a failure mode here. It’s very easy to have an identity as a good person, and then when people threaten your identity as a good person you lash out at them in the same way that Lisp programmers lash out when people suggest Lisp isn’t the best programming language. This can lead to results even more disastrous than bad arguments about politics. So if you’re going to identify as a good person, it’s really really important that your definition of “good person” isn’t “a person who always does the right thing” but “a person who notices their mistakes and tries to fix them.” A similar concern applies to artists, family men, and so on: it’s important to make sure that your definition of artist is not “a person who makes great art” but “a person who values their art and puts a lot of effort into it.”

Keep your identity large. Don’t just identify as a Lisp programmer. Identify as a poet, a mother, a Communist, a Jew, a weightlifter, an altruist, and a Lisp programmer.

If the only identity you have is Lisp programmer, then it’s terrifying to think about not being a Lisp programmer. How will you know who you are? How can you relate to other people? On the other hand, if you have a lot of identities, you have something to fall back on. Even if you have to switch programming languages, your children still exist, you can still benchpress twice your body weight, you still light Shabbat candles, and you still spend an absurd amount of time explaining that your preferred economic system wouldn’t have any gulags at all not even a little bit and capitalism has killed more people than socialism anyway. Your sense of self in a social context remains secure. You can admit the flaws in Lisp or that prices are an elegant means of solving coordination problems, without threatening who you are as a person– because who you are as a person isn’t grounded in just one thing.

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Atheists With A God-Shaped Hole

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post

[This post was prompted by Ryan, a Patreon backer. One Patreon backer who gives $5 or more will be selected each month to prompt a story or blog post about a topic of their choosing.]

I’m an atheist with a God-shaped hole inside my heart.

A lot of people take their God-shaped holes to be arguments in favor of the existence of God. C. S. Lewis argued, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

But this is quite silly. Of course there are desires that exist without satisfaction. Some people want to fuck catgirls. Other people want to be catgirls. Still other people want to never die. I myself want to fly. Indeed, C. S. Lewis is talking about desires without satisfaction right now, he has just decided to make up a story about how they can be satisfied really. By this argument, I could prove that all tomatoes are green because, you see, the red ones are actually green in some other world.

But the interesting thing about one’s God-shaped hole is that it often is filled. Many religious people find that their God-shaped holes are filled through prayer, meditation, religious services, service to others, reading their holy books, having mystical experiences, etc. I will call this category “spiritual experiences”, to be as broad as possible.

There is, of course, nothing supernatural about spiritual experiences, because there’s nothing supernatural at all. Spiritual experiences are a thing that brains do. If you take LSD, you can get them somewhat consistently. I myself had a mystical experience at a Cobra Starship concert once, which was very instructive, because while previously I might have converted due to the intensity of my mystical experiences I am pretty sure that God, however mysterious Her ways, does not talk to people in the form of mediocre dance-pop bands.

So, given that spiritual experiences aren’t supernatural, there is no reason to believe that they ought to be the sole property of believers in the supernatural. Spiritual experiences are a human thing; an atheist is as entitled to them as anything else.

Of course, this is easier for some atheists than others. There are lots of spiritual experiences that can be easily transferred to an atheistic context. Taking long walks in nature. Listening to music. Volunteering at a soup kitchen. Listening to music. Reading poetry. Meditating. Attending a UU church. Certain kinds of BDSM and New-Age-y sex stuff. Being a member of an atheist Alcoholics Anonymous group who turns over your life to the Group Of Drunks.

But there are a lot of desires it’s hard to meet in a secular context. You can’t trust that the universe is being governed by someone who’s watching out for you, that even if something’s going wrong now it is all for the best in the end. You can’t talk to someone extraordinarily powerful who loves you and wants what’s best for you. You can’t resign yourself to the will of a deity who doesn’t exist.

I used to pray. I don’t pray anymore.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with praying as an atheist. You’re basically talking to yourself. If that comforts you, it’s a quite harmless habit. And the sense of guidance one often receives while praying is– like all spiritual experiences– naturalistic. I find that, when I sit quietly and really think about my problems, I often know what I want to do about them; it’s just that in everyday life I am lazy and grouchy and prone to despair, and that makes it difficult for me to do the things I know damn well I want to do. As a religious person, it is easy to think of that knowledge as a grace from God, but that doesn’t mean that’s what it really is.

But I found, over time, that when I prayed as an atheist I knew that God wasn’t there.

For a surprisingly long time, that wasn’t entirely an impediment. It was less satisfying to say “God, forgive me” and know I am talking to myself, but less satisfying is not the same as not satisfying. There was still comfort.

I found that, as I settled more into my secularism, my values changed. Prayers for intercession I did not pray even when I believed; it seemed to me that an omniscient God knew his affairs better than I did. But then I could not praise the beauty of the world without thinking of the senseless suffering in nature, the parasites and the predators and the children dying before they ever lived. Some suffering, perhaps, is a result of human choices and free will; other suffering, perhaps, offers an opportunity to develop virtue and strength. I can see this argument for human suffering. But I cannot see what sort of virtue is developed by a wolf eating a fawn alive, nor how the wolf is exercising its free will if you gave it no other way to eat.

I also developed an ethic of, morally, standing on my own two feet: I desire to do what I want and not do what I don’t want; but because I am a frail human, I often do things the other way around. It grew strange to ask Christ for forgiveness. If I choose my own moral code, my own desires, as the measure against which I test my actions, then the person who is sitting in judgment about me is myself. There is no point in asking for forgiveness from God, because I am concerned about the violation of my own ethics and not his, and anyway he doesn’t exist. My habit of prayer, I worried, reinforced an attitude of failing to take responsibility for my own beliefs.

And then one day I realized that the number of modifications I had to make to prayer to make it work implied that I ought not pray at all. And I stopped, not without sadness.

For me, what helped was finding alternate ways to meet my spiritual needs. I’ve found Secular Solstice to be a tremendous help. I missed singing and ritual with a bunch of people who share my values, and now I get to do that. (Unfortunately, Secular Solstice– in the Bay Area, at least– is still far too white Protestant for my tastes. More call-and-response, please.)

I think part of the reason Secular Solstice works for me is the story.

Secular Solstice has a lot of what one might call mythological elements. The universe does not love us and does not hate us; it is pitilessly neutral in our little struggles. There is no guarantee that we will win. But there is also no guarantee that we will lose. And through courage and rationality and love and all of the other virtues, we have won great victories: the eradication of smallpox; the invention of science; the reduction of the percentage of people living in extreme poverty, over the past two hundred years, from four-fifths of the world’s population to one-tenth. And each of us can play a role, even if small, in advancing these victories: we can eke out a little more knowledge, help people who would not otherwise be helped, support others so they have the strength to keep going.

For me, that fills the same emotional role as the great Christian mythology of Fall and Redemption and Salvation. It fills my God-shaped hole. It also has the virtue of being true.

I do not believe that the myth that moves me will move everyone else; we all have different emotional needs. Perhaps there is no true thing that will fill some people’s emotional needs, and their choice is between half-believing lies and being quite unsatisfied. But I think it’s worth investigating.

Meditation For People Who Hate Meditating

Tags

dbt, ozy blog post, rationality

[content warning: exercise]

I hate mindfulness. Hate it, hate it, hate it. The ten minutes I spend meditating is easily the least pleasant ten minutes of my day.

Unfortunately, I am also a borderline, and mindfulness meditation is the one consistent element in every successful treatment for borderline personality disorder. So here we are.

Over the past few months, I have learned two useful things about meditation that make it a horrible and helpful experience instead of a horrible and pointless experience.

First: meditation is not relaxing. Well, evidently it is relaxing for some people, because every time I read about meditation there’s some asshole being like “I love meditation! I’m so relaxed afterward! It really gives me some time to myself! It’s so important to take some time away from your busy schedule and just be.” This always fills me with seething hatred. I don’t support this seething hatred, mind you. I hope that people who feel relaxed from meditation find their bliss and reach all their goals in life, those fucking douchebags.

For me, meditation is like weightlifting. While exercise can be fun, when you are on your last rep of squatting The Heaviest Thing, you are probably not relaxed and thinking about all the awesome time you’re taking for yourself. You are probably like “oh god, oh FUCK, why am I DOING this, I am ACTUALLY CLINICALLY INSANE, I am NEVER GOING TO EXERCISE AGAIN.” But then throughout the rest of your day you are smarter and more energetic, you can carry in all the groceries by yourself, and you feel happier– if only because, no matter what happens for the rest of your day, you are never going to squat anything again.

(Unfortunately, unlike weightlifting, meditation does not give me a sense of accomplishment at beating my previous successes, a surge of endorphins kicking my anxiety in the ass for hours afterwards, or sick biceps. If this state of affairs changes, I will write a new blog post.)

Meditation is like weightlifting for your brain. It feels absolutely miserable in the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. Just like when you lift weights you’re training your ability to pick up heavy things and put them down, when you meditate (at least for the kind of meditating I do for my BPD) you’re training metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to think about and control your own thinking. Which is skills like:

• recognizing that just because you think everyone in the world hates you doesn’t mean that everyone in the world actually hates you
• realizing that worrying about whether your train is going to be late will not actually cause your train to be on time, and then actually not worrying about it instead of making yourself miserable for no reason
• focusing on the movie you’re watching or the stupidly expensive cheese you’re eating, instead of your to-do list or the dumb thing that someone said on the Internet
• noticing when you are compulsively refreshing Facebook and not doing that
• noticing when you feel the urge to go to and then compulsively refresh Facebook, and then not doing that

So, useful shit, especially if you are a person like me whose brain is naturally like a toddler with a kazoo who has eaten nothing but sugar in the past 24 hours and who has just been taken to a grocery store.

Training metacognition does not have to be fun or relaxing! In fact, it might be wildly unpleasant, especially if you are on Team Emotionally Dysregulated People With Monkey Minds. It’s okay. All those people who enjoy meditation are a great object of loving-kindness meditation.

Second: if the specific reason that your meditation is wildly unpleasant is that you normally block out all your emotions because you feel super-terrible all the time and then once you meditate you are aware of how super-terrible you feel all the time and you try to return your mind to the object of meditation but that just makes you feel worse and worse and then it starts building on itself and then you start crying and have a panic attack–

Well, that happened to me a lot, until I tried a technique from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.

When you start noticing you feel like shit, but before you get to the part where you start crying and have a panic attack, just refocus your attention on the fact that you feel like shit. Make that your object of meditation. Try to notice as many details as you can about it. Where is it located in your body? What physical sensations are associated with it? Observe your thoughts about it.

You want to approach this with an attitude of acceptance and compassion. That means that instead of being all like “ugh, why am I feeling miserable, I’m supposed to be relaxing, this is the worst, I’m so unhappy, I never want to do this again” you want to think “welp, this is what’s happening in my brain right now, I guess. I feel terrible. I hurt all over. That is what’s happening in this moment.” That’s the acceptance bit. And you also want to try to feel a sense of care and concern about yourself: like you’re a little wounded bird that’s in a lot of pain. It’s not a good thing that you’re hurting. It’s actually really bad. You are in pain, and that totally sucks, and you wish that you weren’t.

If your pain gets worse, keep observing it. If it gets better, you can refocus on your breath or your mantra or sending lovingkindness to beings everywhere or whatever your object of meditation is, and then once again when your unhappiness starts distracting you from your object of meditation return to paying attention to your unhappiness.

This is training the skills of self-compassion and actually feeling your pain instead of numbing yourself out. If you’re having this problem, those are probably pretty important metacognitive skills for you to have! (I know it seems like “feeling pain” is a terrible skill, but (a) you are still miserable if you are miserable and constantly distracting yourself from your misery (b) knowing that you’re in pain is necessary to be able to make plans to fix your pain. You can still distract yourself if you need to, but having this skill just means you distract yourself when you think it’s a good idea instead of all the time.) So you shouldn’t be upset at yourself if this is happening; it’s a great opportunity to practice.

(I had the worst time Googling for solutions for this problem, by the way. So I hope this manages to get in the top ten Google results for “adverse effect” “meditation” in case it helps someone else.)

 

An Emotion Regulation Technique That Works For Me

Tags

bpd, dbt, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[epistemic effort: I tried this and it worked for me, but different people’s brains work differently]

Some people theorize that borderlines experience a dialectical dilemma of unrelenting crisis and inhibited grieving. Basically, borderlines both have constant overwhelming emotions and self-destructive behavior, and also avoid emotions that they are frightened of or overwhelmed by. Although these seem like opposites, in reality they are mutually reinforcing: an emotion that is avoided often reappears as a different, overwhelming emotion. This is one of the reasons borderlines often have emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the situation, like feeling ashamed when someone hurts you, or getting angry at people they mistreat.

So that made me wonder if trying to experience emotions I’m avoiding would make me have fewer overwhelming emotions. And the answer is yes!

If I’m experiencing one of my usual overwhelming emotions– anxiety or shame– I identify the trigger of the emotion. For instance, recently, I was feeling a lot of shame about how much of my life I’ve spent being depressed instead of doing anything that was more fun or improved the world. Then I ask myself whether the emotion I’m feeling makes sense. Does it make sense to feel shame about how much of my life I’ve spent depressed? Not really! I don’t expect anyone to reject me for this. And I don’t think it makes me into a fundamentally bad or evil person, particularly given how many of my thoughts were about fun things I didn’t get to do. Not doing fun things does not make you evil.

What emotion would make sense?

Sadness. Loss. Grief.

There are years of my life I spent doing nothing but refreshing social media. There are opportunities I didn’t take advantage of and won’t get again: interesting classes I barely passed or never took, professors I didn’t talk to, college events I never went to. There’s a big gap in my resume I’m not going to be able to fill. There are skills I could have acquired, friendships I could have made or nurtured, experiences I could have had, and instead I spent the time being depressed.

That really sucks.

Next, I figured out how to act in accordance with the justified emotion. In the case of my sadness, I asked my husband Topher to hold me while I cried and not comfort me. His natural urge is to reassure me that this sort of thing happens to everyone and I still have fifty years of my life ahead of me and so on, but what I really needed was to grieve. It felt a little artificial at first– I deliberately thought “it is sad that I didn’t get to spend much time at college”— but eventually I wound up feeling very sad about it and cried for about half an hour.

This works astonishingly well for me! For instance, previously, I’d felt shame about that for a few hours a week, but since I cried about it I haven’t had a recurrence of the shame, and it’s been a couple of months. So if you have overwhelming emotions that don’t seem to go with the things that trigger them, try this! Maybe it’ll work for you.

Thoughts on CFAR’s New Focus

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality

[attention conservation notice: Intended for a rationalist audience, and likely to be of little interest to non-rationalists]
[epistemic effort: I discussed the topic with friends and will update this blog post in response to criticism I consider reasonable]

CFAR has recently pivoted to focusing more on AI safety. I feel a lot of qualms about this, which I wanted to write up in a blog post. I had previously had qualms about cooperation and rationality as the common interest of many causes; however, I think this post addresses my concerns and made me significantly less worried. However, I do have another concern.

I want to make my positionality clear here, because I think it does affect my thinking. Most notably, I am highly uncertain about AI risk, which leads me to consider it not to be one of the most effective cause areas. For obvious reasons, this increases my qualms. I have tried to not say anything that I wouldn’t endorse if CFAR were discussing about pivoting to a focus on global poverty rather than existential risk; however, I encourage my readers to account for my bias when they assess my arguments.

I think that it is possible to create a teachable art of rationality (as in domain-general thinking skills which improve one’s ability to reason in a wide variety of fields), but that we currently do not have one. I believe that a teachable art of rationality would positively affect the world by causing people to make fewer dumbass decisions. For this reason, I care about CFAR’s success. However, while I believe that CFAR likely has a positive effect on its attendees, I’m not convinced that this isn’t due to the Dodo bird verdict: that is, I think it’s likely that CFAR has positive effects because they are kind, empathetic, high-status people who want other people to improve, not because they have necessarily figured out rationality skills yet. To be clear, this is in no way an insult to CFAR: developing an entire new field of psychology is really hard! However, this does mean that I am not a CFAR alum nor did I have any interest in attending CFAR. For this reason, their post making me less likely to want to attend CFAR might not be particularly interesting to CFAR; after all, I wasn’t going to attend there anyway.

CFAR and MIRI have always been very closely linked; for instance, CFAR and MIRI share an office. To the extent that this blog post makes public what was always true, I think it’s good and virtuous; honesty and transparency are an important part of creating evidence-backed charities. Nevertheless, I think that this thing being true is likely to be bad.

Imagine that instead of saying that they were focusing on AI risk, CFAR said that they’d decided that CFAR as an organization would plan and act as though deworming charities were the most important ones to donate to. For this reason, they would prioritize recruitment of people working in the public health sphere (in addition to effective altruists and rationality geeks more generally). They would prioritize skills that are useful in deworming, such as doing expected-value calculations in high-risk situations and avoiding scope insensitivity. Their metrics include the effects their graduates have on deworming.

I have an issue with this hypothetical. Deworming charities being the most important is a specific empirical claim; to believe deworming is the one of the most important causes, one must believe that the studies were well-conducted, that it’s likely the effects aren’t spurious, that they generalize to the locations where deworming is happening, etc. Similarly, the importance of AI risk is also a specific empirical claim: to believe that AI risk is one of the most important causes, one must believe that it’s likely that artificial intelligence will be developed, that it is possible for people currently working on AI to have a positive effect, etc.

But it’s possible that deworming isn’t one of the best interventions. For instance, imagine that the deworming studies were very poorly done. While an ordinary person might not be able to tell that they were poorly done, it’s obvious to someone who knows how to read a study. Now imagine that knowing how to read a study is, in fact, a very important rationality skill. (I’m not claiming either that the deworming studies are poorly done or that knowing how to read a study is an important skill; this is strictly a hypothetical.) I think it’s very possible that hypothetical Deworming CFAR would flinch away from the idea “maybe we should teach people to read studies”. Or they’d run a pilot program, notice that teaching people to read studies tends to make them less enthusiastic about deworming, and say “well, guess that learning how to read studies actually makes people more irrational.” Or they’d still teach the how-to-read-studies unit, but they’d alter it so that people continue to be enthusiastic about deworming afterward– thus not teaching an important aspect of the skill. Or it would never occur to them to teach that unit, perhaps because this is a flaw in the rationality of the employees of Deworming CFAR itself. (After all, they aren’t noticing that deworming is a poor cause area…)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that anyone at CFAR would intentionally teach people poor rationality skills in order to trick them into caring about AI risk. Of course not! CFAR as an organization genuinely cares about developing the art of rationality, and genuinely believes that AI risk is the biggest threat to humanity reaching the stars. But it doesn’t have to be intentional to be harmful. Many biases happen on the subconscious level, as unnoticed flinches or ideas that you happen to overlook.

You might argue that if deworming is not the best cause, surely hypothetical Deworming CFAR would notice this and reorient themselves. But I don’t think that’s true. We don’t have the art of rationality yet. CFAR employees are still vulnerable to confirmation bias, self-deception, and motivated reasoning. I think it’s important to reduce the harm caused by these aspects of human psychology.

I think endorsing specific empirical claims is different from endorsing value sets. For instance, “people in the developing world matter as much as people in the developed world” is a value, as is “it would be bad for humanity to be destroyed.” I do not think that the problems of endorsing empirical claims apply to endorsing values, because values do not generally work in the normal Bayesian way. It is hard to think of evidence that will disprove the claim that people in the developing world matter as much as people in the developed world (…maybe if they’re all p-zombies?). Rationality is, to a very large degree, about gathering and properly updating based on evidence. Therefore, a value has a much lower risk of hurting the rationality curriculum than an empirical belief. This is why I was less worried when it seemed to me that CFAR’s mission was to be a general effective altruist organization, because general effective altruism is almost all about values rather than facts.

CFAR did this shift for very good reasons. There are a lot of potential rationality skills; you need some criteria to be able to prioritize which ones you discover and teach. There are a lot of potential audiences for rationality; you need some criteria to pick which ones you will target. It is important to have integrity; secretly having AI risk as one’s mission while passing oneself off as a cause-neutral rationality organization is wrong. And we’re not trying to develop the art of rationality to make Facebook comment threads better; it makes sense to want to prioritize the most important issues facing the world.

This is probably the part of the post where I am supposed to offer a solution. Unfortunately, I have never run a rationality organization, and I am highly uncertain about what the correct path is. I don’t know how CFAR can get the very real benefits of this pivot while also reducing the risk of their mission distorting their rationality curriculum. But I do think that a first step is keeping in mind the risks.

 

Negative Emotions Are Like Foot Pain

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, polyamory

Negative emotions are like having a pain in your foot.

You can have a pain in your foot for a lot of different reasons. Maybe your shoes don’t fit. Maybe you walked too much yesterday. Maybe you have a corn or a callus. Maybe your foot is broken. Maybe you have arthritis. Maybe you have nerve damage in your feet so it sends you pain signals even when nothing is wrong. It’s important to investigate, figure out exactly what is wrong, and fix it.

It is a bad idea to go “foot pain is bad, and only bad people have foot pain! Therefore my feet don’t hurt.” If you try that, the only thing that’s going to happen is that you’re going to hobble around with a corn for the rest of time. Your foot pain isn’t bad. Whatever’s causing your foot pain is bad, but the foot pain itself is useful! It’s telling you that something is wrong. If you didn’t have any foot pain, you’d never find out when your feet were broken.

It is also a bad idea to go “walking makes my feet hurt, so I am just going to sit on this couch for the rest of time.” Maybe it’s actually your shoes, and if you stopped trying to never wear anything but ballet boots you’d be able to walk fine. Maybe you need to do some physical therapy exercises to get your feet to feel better, even though they hurt; sometimes you need to push through your pain. It’s important to push through your foot pain in a smart way, though; some things that are beneficial hurt, but not everything that hurts is beneficial.

So consider, say, jealousy.

You can feel jealous for a lot of different reasons. Maybe you feel insecure that your partner will find someone a lot smarter and prettier and better than you and then leave you. Maybe your partner isn’t taking enough time for you; you feel lonely and neglected. Maybe your partner gets to do all kinds of cool stuff with his long-distance partner, and the last four conversations you had with him were all about the laundry, and you feel annoyed because you bet he never talks with his long-distance partner about laundry. Maybe you’re naturally monogamous, and trying to be poly, and you feel like your partner dating someone else takes away the specialness of your relationship.

(This comes from a polyamorous context, obviously, but I suspect it should be applicable to monogamous people– after all, nothing about monogamy says you can’t be insecure, neglected, or envious.)

And all of those reasons have different solutions. Maybe you need to work on your sense of self-worth and security, so that you don’t worry your partner will leave. Maybe you need to say to your partner “I want to spend more time with you– let’s have a date night once a week.” Maybe you need to remind yourself that you and your partner’s long-distance partner both have an identical amount of cool stuff, it’s just that yours are spread out over a year while his are crammed into a week when he’s in town, and the latter isn’t actually better. Maybe you need to stop being poly.

It is a bad idea to say “jealousy is bad, and only bad people are jealous! Therefore I’m not jealous.” Jealousy isn’t bad. The cause of your jealousy might very well be bad, but the jealousy itself is useful! It’s telling you that something is wrong. If you didn’t have any jealousy, you’d just run around with neglected relationship needs and no sense of self-worth for the rest of time.

It is also a bad idea to go “when you talk to men by yourself I feel jealous, so you can’t ever talk to men by yourself ever again.” You might not be dealing with the actual problem: maybe the actual problem is that your partner never talks to you about his feelings, which– notably– is not solved by telling him not to talk to other men. The actual issue goes unresolved. And sometimes you have to push through the pain of jealousy: maybe you’re afraid he’ll leave you if he finds someone else attractive. Fear doesn’t go away if you try to avoid it; it only grows. To defeat fear, you have to face it. Of course, that’s dependent on the problem actually being fear: if your problem is that your partner dating other people takes away the specialness, facing them dating other people is not going to fix it. There is no point in going about doing every unpleasant thing, but sometimes it’s a good idea to do some unpleasant things.

You may replace ‘jealousy’ with sadness, fear, anger, disgust, guilt, or shame, as you like.

Frequently Asked Questions About Jerks On The Internet

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

ARRRRRGH THIS PERSON IS SAYING SO MANY MEAN THINGS ABOUT ME ON THE INTERNET I AM GOING TO FIGHT THEM AND TELL THEM HOW AWFUL THEY ARE AND ALSO HOW THEIR FEET STINK.

This is a terrible idea. Please reconsider it.

Why? I don’t want to reconsider it. I want to fight that person who is saying mean things about me. 

Personally, I think good rules for one’s social life are the following:

1. Talk to nice people.
2. Don’t talk to jerks.

You, my friend, are currently violating rule #2, and because of opportunity cost are probably also violating rule #1.

But the person I’m talking to isn’t actually a jerk.

It happens! Sometimes there is a person who is generally a nice and lovely person, pets dogs, gives to charity, doesn’t have a mean bone in their entire body, but there is just one issue that sets them off and they are completely irrational about it. I have a couple of those issues myself. It can be worth it to try to respond to the person and deescalate– maybe they’re having a bad day, and if you talk to them with kindness and compassion, they’ll chill out. But if they don’t chill out, it’s okay to go “welp, that guy is mostly okay, but he’s just a complete jerk about alpacas.”

(Notably, deescalating does not involve insults, snark, ALL CAPS, or multiple exclamation points. If you feel moved to engage in such behavior yourself, it is probably a bad idea to respond even if they are having a bad day– you’ll only make the situation worse.)

The question to ask yourself is not about the moral character of the person you’re considering arguing with. The question is whether there is any chance that the discussion is going to be productive. If the answer is no, why are you engaging in it?

Because they’re saying mean things about me! I have to stop them from saying mean things about me!

No, you don’t.

All of our instincts are horribly miscalibrated for the Internet. Our genetic instincts are designed for tribes of a hundred and fifty people, in which a person constantly misrepresenting you and going on about how you’re an asshole means you’re going to be ostracized and dead in short order. Our cultural instincts are designed for communities of a few thousand people, in which a person constantly misrepresenting you and going on about how you’re an asshole means you have a serious problem on your hands. The Internet, however, contains literally millions of people, and of those millions of people some of them are going to be dickbags.

Over time, however, I’ve come to notice that the only way that jerks on the Internet can hurt me is if I let them.

Is this some sort of Eleanor Roosevelt shit? No one can make me feel inferior without my consent? That’s not actually how human psychology works.

No, I mean what I said literally. If you’re seeing someone saying mean things about you more than once, it is almost always because you made a decision that lets you see the mean things they’re saying about you. Stop making that decision. It’s a terrible decision.

If someone is sending you nasty messages, block them. If you’re on Tumblr and people keep reblogging them, blacklist their name or unfollow the people who reblog mean things about you. If someone is saying nasty things about you on their personal social media accounts, don’t read the nasty things being said about you. You don’t have to. No one is tying you up and forcing you to read what the douchebag is saying– or if they are, you have a much more serious problem than what someone is or is not saying about you on the Internet.

But what if I actually am a terrible person? I have to check and see if they’re saying some reasonable and valid criticism!

In general, people who actually want you to benefit from their criticism will make an effort to phrase it in a tactful way. People who are calling you a vile hypocrite or writing haiku about how your mom fucked a goat are not trying to improve you as a person. They just don’t like you.

Also, why would you trust the judgment of a person who is writing haiku about whether your mom fucked a goat on the subject of whether you’re a good person? They don’t exactly seem like they’re an expert in the topic of good personhood. Best case scenario, they’re irrational on the topic of you and are likely to condemn things that in a saner moment they would think are fine. Worst case scenario, they’re a terrible person, and the things they condemn are likely to be completely uncorrelated with things that are actually bad.

But what if my friends believe them and none of them talk to me and now I am socially isolated?

It’s possible that your friends will all go ‘wow, I didn’t realize so-and-so was a vile hypocrite, now I’m going to mock them mercilessly as well.’ In that case, your problem is not that a jerk is saying mean things about you. Your problem is that you have terrible friends. It is a basic requirement for friendship that they don’t agree with people saying unfair and mean things about you. You should, if anything, feel grateful for the douchebag for enlightening you about how terrible your friends are, so you didn’t have to find it out when facing some actually important issue.

But what if the harassment explodes and I become a trending topic on Twitter because of all the millions of people who want to tell me how terrible I am? Or what if the person is a stalker and eludes my attempts to block him?

It’s true that I’m tacitly assuming that the jerk on the Internet is going to stay one jerk, and not turn into a thousand jerks where you can’t block all of them and some of them might try to get you fired from your job. In the latter case, you have a serious problem. And you might get a very determined stalker who eludes your attempts to block them. However, it is very rare for isolated jerks on the Internet to transform into thousands of jerks or a stalker; the vast majority of the time, blocking the person and no longer reading their stuff will end the issue.

The question to ask is what benefit you’re getting out of the conversation. Talking to stalkers only encourages them. And preventing the one jerk from turning into thousands of jerks implies that you can get the one jerk to stop writing goat fucker haiku about you through reasoned argument and/or insults. So far, I have never actually seen a case of this working. It is hard to argue someone out of being completely irrational on a particular issue, and even harder to argue them out of being a dickbag.

You’re saying I should just let the jerk GET AWAY WITH IT?

No, I’m saying that the jerk should experience the natural consequence of their actions, i.e., nobody wants to talk to jerks except for other jerks. This is a reasonable and proportional consequence for assholishness, which– crucially– does not require you to pay attention to them at any point.

Actually, I’m a supporter of an important cause that that jerk is slandering!

Well, then, it might possibly be worthwhile to talk to a random jerk on the Internet. However, when you do this, remember that you are advancing the cause. You are not arguing to convince the random jerk. You’re arguing to convince someone who happens to be reading your blog. It’s really important that you make the people reading the argument think better of your cause, rather than worse of it.

So you have to use all the tactics people use to convince others to be on their side. Respond calmly and kindly to insults– ideally with a little bit of not-mean-spirited humor. Be willing to point out times you agree with someone. Don’t lecture: ask questions and let the other person draw conclusions. Look at things from their point of view. Leave them an easy way out where they can admit being wrong without losing face. Unfortunately, all of those are really hard when you’re angry! If you’re not going to be capable of doing that, step away from the argument. It’s bad enough that someone is slandering your important cause; there’s no point making it worse.

So what, I’m NOT supposed to get angry that someone is saying mean things about me? 

No, you can totally get angry if you want to. However, continuing to interact with the jerk is a bad way of responding to your anger. Instead, you can try a bunch of other coping mechanisms! You can take a warm bath and light a scented candle and do progressive muscle relaxation and the rest of that froo-froo self-care stuff. You can distract yourself with a sad movie, music that makes you happy, or watching stand-up comedy. You can angrily clean your room (highly recommended). You can pull the covers over your head and refuse to get out for the entire morning. You can complain to your friends about them, but only if that won’t increase the temptation to respond (it always does for me). It’s probably a bad idea to vent, as that seems to increase anger.

I sense a secret evil motivation here.

I totally have one! Some people are just dickbags, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Dickbags gonna dickbag. But in my experience the #1 cause of preventable assholery on the Internet is that someone feels like they’ve got to respond to every asshole who drives them up the fucking wall, because they have to SHOW THE ASSHOLE THE ERROR OF THEIR WAYS and PUNISH ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR and KEEP ALL THEIR FRIENDS FROM ABANDONING THEM or what-the-fuck-ever. Naturally, when you’re angry, you have really shitty judgment about whether your tactics for engaging with someone are (a) the sort of thing you approve of in your better moments, a reflection of the kind of person you want to be (b) going to accomplish your goals, like, at all. Therefore, not only will the tactic recommended in this FAQ keep you from interacting with jerks, it will also help reduce the number of jerks on the Internet by keeping you from being one.

Ozy, you are terrible at not responding to jerks on the Internet.

Why do you think I wrote the FAQ?

Against Steelmanning

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

I hate the word ‘steelmanning.’

Steelmanning refers to arguing with the best possible version of someone’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented. Put like that, it sounds really good! After all, we all think it’s important not to misrepresent people [citation needed]; trying to present the best possible version of someone’s argument is good.

The problem is that every time I’ve seen the word ‘steelman’ used, it’s referring to one of two things.

In the least obnoxious case, Alice misinterprets and strawmans Bob’s argument, and then presents the argument Bob actually made as a steelman. That kind of steelmanning can feel really frustrating and condescending: not only is this person strawmanning you, but they’re also acting like you’re an idiot and they’re so much better than you for being able to think of the argument you actually made. However, it’s not that bad, because at least Alice does eventually get around to arguing with something that Bob actually said, however self-deceptive and strawmanny she is in the process. The best way to eliminate this sort of steelmanning is just to ask “did you mean [insert steelman argument here]?”

In the most obnoxious case, Alice doesn’t actually understand Bob’s argument at all. Often, there are fundamental worldview differences: for instance, Bob might be a Marxist, while Alice is not only a liberal but does not realize that non-liberals exist at all. That sort of steelmanning can feel like looking at your beliefs distorted in a funhouse mirror: Bob plaintively cries “but I don’t actually believe in autonomous individuals making decisions uninfluenced by society!” as Alice continues “now, the strongest form of ‘exploitation,’ I think, is that sometimes workers aren’t in a good bargaining position compared to employers, which can be totally solved by a universal basic income…”

That form of steelmanning is actively harmful to epistemic charity and to careful thought. Instead of understanding that people believe things differently from you, you’re transforming everyone into stupider versions of yourself that don’t notice the implications of their own beliefs. In fact, this kind of steelmanning is a form of strawmanning.

You can say “but neither of those are actually steelmanning! Real steelmanning is being able to put other people’s viewpoints in words they themselves find more compelling than their own arguments!” However, that is an extraordinarily rare and difficult skill; even most people who do it once can’t do it consistently. Saying “to steelman position X…” should be interpreted the same way as saying “to express perfect loving kindness for all beings…” It’s certainly a nice ideal which people might want to approach, and some people even manage to pull it off sometimes, but it’s a bit arrogant to declare that you’re definitely doing it. Even when you think you are, you usually aren’t.

What are the alternatives to steelmanning?

First, seek to understand the actual viewpoints people you disagree with are actually advocating.

Second, seek out intelligent and well-informed advocates of viewpoints you disagree with. You don’t have to make up what your opponents believe! As it happens, you have many smart opponents!

Third, whenever possible, try to switch conversations from a debate focus to a collaborative truth-seeking focus. This is best in one-on-one conversations between people who trust each other. You should be able to say “hm, but I’ve just noticed this piece of evidence against my position” without the person talking to you jumping on you and saying “ha! This proves I’m right! You admit it! I win I win!”– and they’ll do you the same favor.

Two Corollaries To Growth Mindset

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

A lot of people I know try to acquire a ‘growth mindset.’ Growth mindset is the opposite of fixed mindset: growth mindset emphasizes that your skills can grow and develop, while fixed mindset emphasizes your inborn abilities. Growth mindset is alleged to improve persistence, motivation, willingness to embrace challenges, and hard work.

I like having a growth mindset. However, I have two corollaries to add, however, which very much improved my experience of developing a growth mindset.

First of all, be careful how you frame ‘growth mindset.’ It is always possible for you to improve; it is not always possible for you to reach a specific achievement. If you are 5’2″, you are probably never going to become a member of the NBA; however, you can most certainly improve your basketball skills. If you say “I can become a member of the NBA as long as I try hard and believe in myself”, you’re lying to yourself. If you say “if I put in a lot of time and effort, I can practice basketball and become a better basketball player,” then this is quite true. There is absolutely nothing about growth mindset as conceived of in the psychological literature which requires that you believe you should be capable of literally everything, but a lot of people wind up thinking that it does, and then they waste their effort in a fruitless attempt at self-deception.

This caveat is really important for disabled people. It might be true that if you worked hard then you would improve your driving skills, but if you have certain disabilities like blindness or dyspraxia it might also be true that no matter how hard you work you’ll never be a safe driver. It’s not fixed mindset to say “given my limitations, it’s dangerous for me to be on the road, and it will be no longer how hard I work at driving.” It’s just good sense.

Second, remember that just because you can improve something doesn’t mean you should. My motor skills are terrible: I continually knock over glasses, run into furniture and drop things; my handwriting is unreadable, I spill food on myself, and don’t even ask about my ability to tie my shoes. If I wanted to, I could improve my motor skills, probably through seeking the services of an occupational therapist. But occupational therapy is time-consuming, I have a lot of things going on in my life, and I can actually get by fine by only wearing shoes without laces, never handwriting anything, and buying the extended warranty on my laptops.

It is true that with sufficient effort people can improve anything. However, it might be that the effort required is unreasonable for you right now (you might not have the spare time to go to occupational therapy). It might be that improving at a skill requires more effort for you than for most people (you might have to practice five or six times as long as another person to be equally good at throwing and catching a ball). It might be that you have limitations that other people don’t have (maybe occupational therapy is very emotionally taxing for you because of being bullied for your clumsiness as a child).

To me, it feels very empowering to say “I can improve, but I don’t want to.” I get to make decisions about my own life! I have agency! I can decide to do things! If I’m bad at something, I can decide to put effort into it without thinking “but I’m so awful at this, I shouldn’t bother”, or I can decide to skip it without thinking “but other people can do this! I should be able to too!” If I’m good at something, I can decide to put effort into it without thinking “I’m already okay at this, I should stop wasting my time trying to get better”, and I can decide to skip it without thinking “I’m wasting my potential.”

There are lots of skills I could improve in my life: spinning poi, speaking Swahili, emotion regulation, poetry recitation, fixing roofs… I only have seventy years on this earth! I have to prioritize! I can’t try to improve literally every skill I could conceivably improve! It’s okay to say “you know what, this isn’t a high priority for me. My energy can be better spent elsewhere.”

Some people will take great offense at people admitting that they don’t want to do things because it’s not worth it. They think “but you just admitted you could have readable handwriting if you worked harder, therefore there is absolutely no excuse for not putting the effort in other than SHEER LAZINESS!” This is particularly common for people who are bad at skills most people have (like handwriting) or for skills that are particularly valued by whomever’s doing the complaining (weight isn’t really a skill, but fat people get this all the time).

Of course, if you are an adult, you get to make your own tradeoffs about what you do or don’t care about. Other people may certainly get to object or even stop talking to you (if, for instance, you decide one of the things you don’t care about is their happiness). But other people’s shitty handwriting is what is technically referred to as ‘none of your fucking business.’

To people who are like this: I would propose that you consider how much better you could get at playing wastepaper basketball if you put three hours a day of practice. If you’re like “but I have things to do! I don’t want to become the world’s best player of wastebasket basketball!”, then maybe you should consider that other people have priorities too.

If you’re around a person like that, feel free to say “I can’t” whenever you mean “I have done the cost/benefit analysis and it is not worth it.” Growth mindset is an internal reframe that doesn’t have to be applied to hostile outsiders.

Why I’m Skeptical Of Thought Experiments

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality, utilitarianism it works bitches, world's worst vegan

Recently, I’ve grown extremely skeptical of thought experiments as a way of finding truth.

Consider the Chinese Room thought experiment. A man who does not speak Chinese receives a series of Chinese characters from the outside. He flips through a very big book which tells him which set of Chinese characters to send out as a response. Intuitively, the system could not be said to really understand Chinese. The conclusion is that mere symbol manipulation, such as that performed by a computer program, cannot be said to understand things.

Now consider an objection I’ve read somewhere but I tragically haven’t been able to find. [ETA: It’s made by Scott Aaronson!  Thanks to Anonymous Colin, AlexR, and embrodski.] A dictionary that could take any sentence of Chinese and come up with a coherent response would have to be huge— maybe the size of a planet, maybe larger. Even to look things up in that dictionary in a timely manner would be a huge endeavor, probably involving all manner of machines and robots and computer programs and other such things. If you imagine that, suddenly it gets a lot harder to say that the system doesn’t understand Chinese.

Or compare an objection in “Animal Rights: Legal, Philosophical, and Pragmatic Perspectives” (link goes to book containing the essay), an essay by Richard Posner I read recently, that said that utilitarian views on animal rights were wrong because it implies that one should help a stuck pig before a stuck human if the stuck pig is suffering more. Of course, that framing brings to mind (at least to me) the idea of both a human and a pig having a mild cut. If one instead says that the pig is suffering unimaginably brutal tortures while the human has a stubbed toe, obviously the pig should be helped first. But if you grant that– as Winston Churchill said to the beautiful woman– we already know what you are, and now we’re just haggling about the price.

My point here is not about the Chinese Room thought experiment or animal rights or Winston Churchill. Hopefully, even if you do not find my examples change your opinions on the thought experiment, you can understand how they would change it for other people. My point is that the intuitive response to thought experiments is based on small details of how they’re framed that we might not even recognize consciously– like the idea that the man is sitting in a relatively small box with a book in front of him on the desk, or that both the pig and the human are cut a little bit– and that if you change those details the intuitive response changes greatly.

I think a lot of this is because we might know the answer our intuitions got, but we don’t know how it got there. If you actually knew that the reasoning process was “both pig and human have a cut, pig seems to be in more distress, humans generally matter more than pigs, the pig isn’t in that much more distress, I will help the human”, then this would obviously not cause you to disagree with Peter Singer’s ideas about animal rights. But if all you have is “I will help the human”, you can imagine all sorts of things about how you got there– and unless you happen to think of the thought experiment that proves that your imagination is wrong, you won’t ever notice.

This means that thought experiments are not terribly reliable for establishing knowledge. You may think “yes! I have established the consistent ethical principle that pigs only matter to the extent that humans care about them!”, but in reality you have only established the principle that you care less about pigs that have been cut a little bit than about humans that have been cut a little bit. That is a good principle of great utility in veterinary triage, but not exactly the sort of thing you want to ground a philosophy of animal rights on.

For this reason, I have started to back away from using thought experiments. Whenever possible, I refer to specific details of factual situations that I am thinking about; when it is not possible, I try to keep my thought experiments narrowly tailored, and I keep an eye out for details that may cause the reader to have intuitive reactions for reasons they don’t necessarily endorse.