An Algorithmic Lucidity

Maybe self-esteem makes sense for deontologists who think that being a good person is a matter of obeying some knowable set of rules, but I think that the goodness of a person is a real number, probably bounded but with no known upper bound. Saying "I'm a good enough person just the way I am; I deserve self-esteem" isn't bad so much as it is meaningless: once you know what you've done and how close the results were to (your current estimate of) what the results should have been, then there's nothing left to describe, no further question to be answered.

Do you ever have trouble reconciling your social role of "ordinary college student at a mediocre state university" with your secret identity as junior member of an elite conspiracy to take over the world?

Yeah, me neither.

For five years I've known that at some point I need to stop shouting, "the Authorities lied to me; why why why why did they lie to me?!" and start saying, "Okay, so extant social institutions are flawed in knowable ways, and my parents and teachers didn't tell me. Given my current state of information, this shouldn't actually be surprising, so let's stop crying about it and get on with the whole world optimization thing."

But I don't know how to make the switch; after five years, I still don't know how to break clean. It's so much easier to wallow in the pain. Maybe some amount of wallowing was even justified, this time five years ago. But now, I clearly have much better things to do with my life.

Speaking of addiction, I suspect that relinquishing ideologically-induced moral outrage is actually harder than getting over many chemical dependencies (although I don't have any experience with the latter). At least with a drug, it's simple enough to draw a bright line around actions you're not supposed to do anymore; you can try pouring the contents of the liquor cabinet down the drain, or signing a commitment contract to not buy or borrow any more cigarettes.

But when one of your most strongly-held beliefs (strongly-held in the sense of emotional relevance, not actual probability; I'm very confident in the monotone sequence theorem, but the truth of its negation wouldn't be a blow to who I am) turns out to be false—or if it still seems true, but it turns out that being continually angry at a Society that disagrees isn't a good allocation of cognitive resources—what do you do then? Turning your life around from that isn't anything as straightforward as preventing specific chemicals from entering your body; you have to change the way you think, which is to say excise a part of your soul. Oh, it grows back—that's the point, really; you want to stop thinking non-useful thoughts in order to replace them with something better—but can you blame me for having a self-preservation instinct, even if my currently-existing self isn't something that ought to be preserved?

But then, blame or the lack thereof isn't the point.

Then the Dean understood what had puzzled him in Roark's manner.

"You know," he said, "You would sound much more convincing if you spoke as if you cared whether I agreed with you or not."

"That's true," said Roark. "I don't care whether you agree with me or not." He said it so simply that it did not sound defensive, it sounded like the statement of a fact which he noticed, puzzled, for the first time.

"You don't care what others think—which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do?"

"No."

"But that's ... that's monstrous."

"Is it? Probably. I couldn't say."

In this passage from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, fictional character Howard Roark demonstrates a very important skill that I really need to learn—that of emotional indifference to arbitrary people's opinions: not the mere immunity of "It's okay that people now disagree with the manifest rightness of my Cause, because I know the forces of Good will win in the end," but the kind of outright indifference that I feel about, let's say, the amount of precipitation in Copenhagen in March 1957. Someone disagrees with the manifest rightness of my Cause? Sure, whatever—hey, did you see the latest Questionable Content?

I say this purely for pragmatic reasons. There's nothing philosophically noble about being narrowly selfish, about devoting the full force of one's attention to questions like "What do I want to study?" or "How am I going to make money?" rather than "Why are my ideological enemies so evil, and what can be done to stop them?" So if there's no inherent reason why scholarship or business are more worthy than activism, why explicitly renounce the activist frame of mind?

Because activism is painful and it doesn't work very well. I'm tired of hating Society (whatever that means) for not being what I wish it were. What good has it done me or anyone else, all the hours I've spent over the past five years, fuming and raving over how I have been wronged?

Better by far to focus on the tiny scrap of the world that I actually have control over: to bury my head in a subculture of my kind of people, to master valuable skills, to make piles of money and donate a fraction of it to organizations that are doing valuable work, rather than waste any more precious moments of thinking time being personally offended by all the evil in the world. If someone's interested in what I think, then I graciously welcome them to read this blog. If I see a cheap opportunity to possibly change someone's behavior for the better—to offer them a rationality tip, or glance at them disapprovingly when they violate a social norm that really ought to be kept intact—then I'll take it. But if not, then not.

Some might object that if everyone thought this way, then all social progress would halt: the moral progress of humankind depends on the selfless activists who sacrifice so much to change so little. To which I reply: sure. But not everyone thinks this way, and my relinquishing the cloud of moral outrage that's been making me so unhappy isn't going to change that. We all have our roles to play in this Great Romance of Determinism, and it's long past time for me to finally choose a role that works, rather than one that doesn't.

I will not be rich; I will not be famous; who can say but that in a year's time, my desiccated corpse will be found abandoned in the most desolate of wastelands?—but! By the stars which may one day yet still be ours, I will understand!

cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, procrastination of boring-but-genuinely-worth-doing tasks, moral outrage

Don't panic; keep it together; silently lower your estimate of your general competence.

Overdue book fines are a terrible sin, not because of the harm done to other library stakeholders, but because of what they say about you as a person: not only did you not get around to finishing the books you (apparently erroneously) thought you wanted to read, but you weren't even responsible enough to bring them back on time.

Decision-theoretically speaking, there's no difference between punishment and lack-of-reward. (Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions are really only defined up to an affine transformation: if your behavior is described by u(x), then v(x) := au(x) + b does just as well.) Psychology isn't like that; punishment and lack-of-reward are very different things—although not quite so different as one might think. In an environment where behavior X is rewarded with praise and status, and behavior Y is ignored—not punished, not condemned, but ignored—what kind of mind would it take to persist in behavior Y? It would either have to be very stubborn, unshakeably convinced in the righteousness of Y, or very stupid, desperately willing to endlessly chase a satisfaction that will never, ever come.

I'm not sure, but I suspect that I'm running a friendship deficit—that I need my friends more than they need me.

In a naively romanticized world of "pure" and unconditional love, you would never have occasion to think of such things: friends are always there for each other, no matter what, and no one would dream of anything so monstrous as consciously evaluating whether it's worth maintaining a friendship given the costs and benefits of doing so (including the opportunity cost of forgoing something else that could be done with the same amount of time and attention).

And in a world of Bayesian expected-utility-maximizing decision agents, there would be no loyalty and no concept of friendship.

Part of the beauty of our world is that it lies somewhere between the two extremes, but that we don't know exactly where.

Friend of the blog Alicorn tweets:

Why is the word "dreams" used to describe both pseudorandom nocturnal hallucinations and also heartfelt aspirations for real life?

A cynic might reply: because both the nocturnal hallucinations and the heartfelt aspirations are, for the most part, composed of lies. How many people, what proportion of the time, will actually lift a finger (or open a book, or make a telephone call) to work towards actually achieving what they believe to be heartfelt aspirations?

It's tempting to be resentful that other people don't value your time the way you do. You complain at every opportunity: "Why, why, why do I get socially rewarded for working on this-and-such random chore that doesn't even help anyone, when obviously my great masterpiece (in progress, in potentia, coming soon) on such-and-this is so much more valuable?!"

But I think it's better not to be resentful and not to complain, mostly because it doesn't work. Other people don't care about your great masterpiece on such-and-this. They really don't. Maybe someone, somewhere will care after it's done, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone's support in advance—or, alternatively and isomorphically, it is reasonable, but given that there's nothing you can do to force people to be reasonable, reasonableness is not the correct criterion to be paying attention to.

You can't help being economically dependent on other people, but it seems like it ought to be possible to lessen your emotional dependence: to treat praise and criticism as evidence about the effectiveness of your actions, but not as a controlling force, not as a verdict. This is likely to be desirable not only because if you have fewer needs, then there are fewer ways in which you can be hurt, but also because it is necessary in order to accomplish anything at all: if you're dependent on other people's approval, how will you ever summon the energy needed to finish the masterpiece that no one (yet) cares about but you?

If it helps—consider that if everyone else already valued everything you value, then your existence would be superfluous. Maybe it would be better to be superfluous, better if the world were already perfect without there being anything left for you to contribute—but there's no profit in considering such a remote counterfactual. Take a deep breath, try not to let the subsequent exhalation sound like a mournful sigh, and get back to work, or whatever it is you do.

I often go a couple days without bothering to shave, but never much longer, because the stubble quickly becomes intolerable: I end up compulsively touching my face out of what I want to describe as a mildly horrified perverse fascination, perhaps of the same kind that would motivate picking at a scab, or poking a tumor.

Supposedly the method of pomodoros is a great technology for overcoming procrastination: you work in twenty- or twenty-five-minute timed blocks, each of which are atomic, indivisible: you have to work through the block, and if you let yourself wander away to something else, then it doesn't count. Katja Grace explains why this is a good idea:

While working, there are various moments when it would be easier to stop than to continue, particularly if you mostly feel the costs and benefits available in the next second or so, and if you assume that you could start again shortly [...] Counting short blocks of continuous time working pretty much solves this problem for me. [...] [A]t any given moment there might be a tiny short term benefit to stopping for a second, but there is a huge cost to it. In my case this seems to remove stopping as an option, in the same way that a hundred dollar price on a menu item removes it as an option without apparent expense of willpower.

It is a good idea (I can only imagine), and yet one can't help but guess that, like spaced repetition software or any number of other technologies for living a better life, the number of people who have heard of the method of pomodoros and judged it a good idea is far larger than the number of people who have actually given it an honest try. I could lament how terrible this is, and condemn the human spirit as being lazy and therefore evil, but it seems besides the point—we have no reason to care about moral grandstanding, we want something that actually works.

One asks oneself: is this little piece of boring but genuinely-worth-doing work really that bad, really so terrible that setting a twenty-minute timer and actually facing it would be too much to bear? One wants to say that the answer can't possibly be Yes, that if one's actions betray an implicit Yes it can only mean that one wasn't really paying attention to the question. The natural inclination is then to ask if paying attention to the question is really that terrible, but that would be too obvious.

It seems as if my outlook on life varies drastically with mood. In the moments when I feel brave and ambitious, I rarely seem to remember that it won't last: that in a week or a day, the moment will be gone and I'll feel weak and scared again—and of course it goes conversely, too.

We don't have the technology or the wisdom to redesign our own emotions. If the moments of weakness-and-fear aren't going away, and if neither mood is exactly a belief that could be destroyed by the truth, then it seems like it would at least be useful to remember, if for no other reason than to avoid wasting cognition devising plans and expectations that aren't sufficiently robust to ordinary emotional variation.

It feels immoral to even think of using techniques to motivate oneself; one should instead just use one's free will to choose the correct action. How utterly degrading it would be, how insulting to the very notion of human dignity, to stoop to the level of contemplating one's own psychology using mere cause-and-effect reasoning, as if one were some sort of animal, or a machine!

But this moralizing is itself immoral, because it doesn't work. If I'm not smart enough to do the right thing for the right reasons, then I might at least aspire to do the right thing for the wrong reasons for the right reasons.

Let me know if someone's actually done this.

Experiment: Use undergraduate schoolstudents as test subjects. Give each subject a shuffled deck of playing cards and ask them to sort it by suit and rank as quickly as possible. Time how long each subject takes to complete the task.

Prediction: A minority of computer science students will markedly outperform everyone else.

Dear reader, I have this ... friend, who has this problem, and I wanted to ask—

What do you mean, Who is he? You wouldn't know ... her, and—

You must realize that I'm already aware that it's a standard trope for someone to say "I Have This Friend" when they're really talking about themselves, and given that I know it's already a standard trope, I would never be so obvious as to actually do it! Therefore you must truthfully conclude that I really am talking about a—

Okay, that's a good point. No, I didn't consider the fact that that reasoning can't possibly be sound because if it were, then people would use it as an excuse to falsely claim that they were speaking about a friend rather than themselves, thereby contradicting the assumption that the reasoning is—

Well, we could try to calculate the probability that I really am talking about a friend conditional on your epistemic state and taking into account the game-theoretic considerations just mentioned, but that could take all night, so will you just listen to my transparent lies for fuck's sake?

Thank you. So I have this friend, who has this problem, which is that there's a not-infrequently-occurring scenario in which she has trouble doing stuff, which is this: she feels morally obligated to make progress on some work she owes someone else, but she also wants to make progress on her own personal projects. She thinks she ought to work on the thing she owes someone before she works on her own stuff, but doesn't feel motivated to work on the thing for someone else, and she doesn't feel like she's earned the right to work on her own stuff, so she just ends up doing nothing instead. (Or not literally "nothing"; she looks at mildly informative articles and mildly amusing captioned images on the internet. But that should be considered a ground state which might as well be called nothing.) And so the day becomes a double tragedy: not only has she failed her sacred duties to someone else, she's also failed her sacred duties to herself, and for what? Tech news emphemera? Keeping up with all the comments on her favorite community blog? An adorable animated Graphics Interchange Format file of Rainbow Dash jumping on a bed? Not worth it!

Of course the right thing to do would be to efficiently work on the project she owes someone for a reasonable amount of time, and then work on her own project, but if my friend knew how to "just" do the right thing regardless of psychological state, then this problem wouldn't exist (and I wouldn't waste your time telling you about a problem that doesn't even exist on behalf of my friend who also doesn't ex—uh, doesn't ex–pect me to annoy you with problems that—unlike my friend—don't exist). To say that she should "just use willpower" isn't necessarily wrong, but it needs to be made more specific for the use of my poor friend, or an easier-to-use (although morally or pragmatically inferior) strategy is needed.

So I recommended to my friend that when she notices herself in this situation, maybe she should just start working on her personal stuff that moment, with the quiet hope that the psychological momentum of doing something, anything, can be carried over to fulfilling her obligations to others later in the day. Again, it's not the right thing to do, but surely it's better than what she lets happen now. It is written that the perfect is the enemy of the good, with the implied moral being that we should side with the merely good. I would prefer to say that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and while we would hope for the perfect to mercilessly annihilate all its enemies, sometimes you have to temporarily ally with a stronger enemy (in this case, the good) in order to vanquish an even greater foe (in this case, evil). But for humans at least, it amounts to the same thing.

Did I say the Right Thing?