Project: Part 0: Considering major life choices

[MetaCreation]

@Elliot

@MetaCreation

Why do people leave CF?

You can review examples in the BoI and FI discussion archives at Curiosity Blog – eBooks My discussion with Aubrey de Gray, also on that page, is essentially another example.

Posters who have been around for years might be willing to offer some summaries or answer some questions.

There are more recent examples such as Elliot Temple and Corentin Biteau Discussion and Curiosity – Firebench Debate

My one word summary of the main reason people leave is: dishonesty. I have stuff on that topic like Lying · Elliot Temple

This is way way way more than I realised at first, I’ve now looked into the content of the links. I expect I’m going to keep coming back to this in piecemeal ways as I think of good ways to find and identify specific things to discuss.

I’m going to try to study the Corentin Biteau discussion (146 posts) for now as that is not veryveryveryvery long. E.g. the Aubrey de Gray discussion (267 pages) would be a bad candidate for me owing to it’s length. I’m estimating that pages are typically longer than posts as I more precise measure (e.g. character count) would be time consuming as the forum only loads posts near the current post so it’s impossible to select all.

I think it’s worth looking at why Corentin thought he was leaving and why Elliot thought he was leaving for contrast. I think the first explicit mention of leaving is post 113 so I’ve focused my reading starting from there. I’ll try to summarise the reasons below. I’m going to include post number references to each reason if people want to discuss them but I want to start with relatively clear lists unbroken by including full quotes:
Elliot Temple reasons:

• Post 120: Corentin’s poor discussion skills make things slow/frustrating for him and that is a cause of him wanting to quit. My thoughts Corentin has inaccurate expectations of how long conflicts of opinion take to honestly resolve, the problems he caused could have been solved if he’d had more patience.
• Post 123: Corentin is arrogant and makes claims about a new issue then claims he is leaving My thoughts: Elliot doesn’t directly say this is why he is leaving. I am guessing that is a factor. I think people do this when they try to make a status play, trying to achieve the proverbial “mic drop”, and that is behind the arrogant behavior.
• Guessing from the quoted post from Elliot: Dishonesty My thoughts: There are a lot of things that Corentin is dishonest about. Some specific ones that I think are most relevant to why he decided to leave: Corentin doesn’t honestly want to learn new ideas that conflict with his existing ones. Corentin doesn’t honestly pursue truth, and wants shortcuts and easy answers.

Corentin Biteau reasons:

• Post 113: Has a strong (busy? or inflexible?) schedule “next year” (from Dec '22, so quite soon after saying it) - wants to wrap things up to save time. From the short warning, he possibly expected the thread to already be coming to a conclusion (or presumably would have mentioned this sooner). My thoughts I think this is an excuse, I think it’s very strange for someone to have absolutely no room for even e.g. an hour writing posts a week, so I’m not satisfied with this answer (but it may be worth listing some common excuses as part of answering my original question).
• Post 118: Corentin thinks Temple has standards that are so high that even if he’s wrong, people will not be able to ever change his mind.
• Post 120: Corentin doesn’t understand the relevance of a tangential topic, gets frustrated by this rather than trying to understand the relevance. My thoughts: Repeatedly avoids looking for clear definitions of words. Seems to have “checked out” on the conversation and isn’t looking up really easy stuff.
• Post 136: Elliot has the most downvotes on EA, Corentin think this means he is low quality. Elliot has lots of long discussions on EA that don’t result in coming to an agreement and Corentin thinks this is because of Elliot. Corentin thinks whether Elliot or his interlocutor is right is a matter of “chances” and that Elliot’s chances are slim. My thoughs: Corentin mistakenly judges competence on likeability, popularity, and probabilty. Note he retracts the part about downvotes in post 140. But someone could still leave CF for this reason so I’m leaving this in.
• Post 140: Corentin had “high expectations” (approximately: that debate would be resolved quickly) and did not get that, which he thinks is a sign of poor quality. Corentin did not learn as much as expected and got frustrated. My thoughts: I’m guessing that Corentin is used to getting given packaged ideas by academia and doesn’t know much about debating conflicting ideas.
• Post 144: Corentin does not understand Popper or want to study Popper. He thinks Elliot should write a summary of Popper’s ideas to convince him to study Popper. He claims Elliot said many things that are “hard to verify”, which Corentin seems to think makes them irrelevant.

This is my first pass on this just going through that topic. I will come back to this in a later post to break this down into a more general purpose list of why people leave in principle.

@Elliot

@MetaCreation

What’s a good way of choosing what work to do? What should it achieve or create?

You should like it. If it clashes with your intuitions or subconscious, but you try to do it anyway due to explicit arguments, you’ll probably have a bad time and do mediocre work. You don’t want a career you’re conflicted about.

It’s possible to change your subconscious and intuitions to change your interests, but most people are bad at that. You can try something for a while and see if you like it. If not, you can try some more (if you don’t mind too much) and see if it grows on you. Sometimes things don’t click initially but improve within a few months. If it’s still not working after 3 months, that sometimes just isn’t really fixable for people no matter what rational arguments they have saying they should like it. Sometimes you can identify and fix a specific problem: e.g. you might find a different book or teacher with better explanations and like the subject much better once you start actually understanding it.

Your interests and other ideas have shaped you for many years and informed how you look at the world and interpret things, and what information you’ve gathered, so changing fields can be way way way more work than you would expect. You could have to review and reinterpret a ton of stuff. So it’s usually better to look for something that already fits some of your existing interests and talents reasonably well.

Another important consideration is finding high leverage work (matters both to pay and making a difference). Also honest work, creative work, and work that makes things better or about the same, not worse.

I think this is a really good answer. I’m tentatively accepting it as a final answer to this project question.

Project notes

@MetaCreation

What’s a good way of choosing what work to do? What should it achieve or create?

This question is now answered.

I’m going to count this post as my project goal for the week, as I took quite a lot of time to study the Corentin v Elliot debate, collect answers and add my thoughts on them.