Project: Part 0: Considering major life choices

10 years of learning stuff and not using it in your life is a LOT. that’s actually competitive with what regular school does. K-12 + university is a lot of years. people use some of the earlier stuff in their lives while going to school, but they usually don’t use much of the later learning in their lives until after they graduate and get a job, at which point they use some stuff, but they never use most of it.

and if you’re already age 20+, then putting your life somewhat on hold to learn stuff for 10 years is too long. or if you don’t put your life on hold, and you make lots of major life decisions, then it’d be better to use some at least CF ideas to help you make better decisions, analyze what you’re doing more rationally, etc. if you’re spending that long learning it, some of it should be working for you in ways you could apply it.

stuff like brainstorming lists or making trees or freewrites to help think through a topic are things someone could easily be doing in the first year. i think those ideas don’t cause people trouble anyway.

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I don’t think you can prescribe a time period to spread it out over.

I guess all of the things you mention (different orders to learn things in) could work for some people. But I don’t think there’s one universal way to map it out that will work for everyone.

For example, people who have emotional triggers that are activated as a result of learning CF aren’t all the same. Though a lot of triggers are pretty common and one kind of trigger could be found in a lot of people, you can’t predict what combination of triggers an individual has. Trying to devise a plan to learn CF that doesn’t trigger anyone will then result in some people (who have “less” triggers so to speak) being held back in their progress.

I think it’s better to focus on incremental growth (or maybe: unlearning a habit of overplanning things.)

It’s great to want to be smart and rational and knowledgeable and wise or whatever, but it’s not very productive to try to plot out the entire path to that end especially for someone who is early on the journey and not very smart, rational, knowledgeable or wise (and so not a good judge of how to reach that goal, or even what that goal really is).

If someone looks at it incrementally they take one thing that they think will improve them toward that goal, complete that, then decide what’s next with their improved knowledge. So each new small thing they may improve their skill to decide the next thing, with quasi-exponential growth.

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So, someone needs to have children or humanity dies and that would be terrible. (AGI may possibly change this when it is created)

Existing ideas about whether people should have children seem generally pretty bad.

From EA

by effective altruists having children, it can improve their well-being, help to ensure the continuation of the effective altruism movement, speed up human development, and create more happiness in the world

This is from the summary. They start off with having an agenda for what the child will become. I skimmed the rest of the article to check if I’d understood it correctly, I think I have. This argument is that people should have children to use them for their agenda.

From LW
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/siB3rGkGmn46GFKQt/parenting-and-happiness

This talks a lot about the statistics of people with children and how happy they are. And sure, I think it’s important for parents to be happy and that contributes to the wellbeing of their children. But I don’t think it tries to understand the specifics of which parents are happy and why, so I don’t think it’s useful in deciding.

Another from LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nzsHQzsvwLw6g4pyE/review-selfish-reasons-to-have-more-kids

This article about a book is interesting and talks a little about parenting style. But it doesn’t go into some important specifics like what sort of parenting styles are they comparing? Do the people who did the studies know the best parenting styles? This may be an absence of the article rather than the book. I think the book may be worth reading. There are some other linked articles at the bottom of that article that may be interesting too and I might read them as I consider the subject more.


There are a lot of articles about it out there. I think those were the less flawed ones.

Children are great. Human lives are great. A child has limitless potential and helping one grow and learn well creates a lot of good and creativity in the world. You could say that parenting is metacreative.

But there are other actions that create good in the world too.

I think there will be lots of people having children whatever any individual decides. It’s not like good people having children and caring for them well will reduce the amount of children raised by bad people. I’m also not convinced by the Idiocracy theories that society will get dumber because smart people generally have less kids. So I guess it’s not urgent that all good people do.

A couple of primary criteria that I think are worth making explicit (though slightly redundant as I don’t think people who fail these criteria would really be good):

  • They don’t want to control children and dictate their growth
  • They don’t want to use children as status symbols or live through them/claim credit for their achievements

So I don’t think all good people should have children. But perhaps they should if:

  • They want to (and are able to) put the potentially huge amount of time and money into raising a child
  • They want to learn how to parent well and don’t think they will “naturally” know how to do it
  • They have the ability to effectively think and plan long-term (years, at least) and keep to long-term commitments
  • They think creating a new human life is the best way of creating good and/or think it’s compatible with their other ways of creating good
  • They’re young and healthy enough to keep up (or at least one of the parents are)
  • They like children

Project notes

I don’t think this is an answer I’m strongly committed to and is just my first efforts to put something into explicit form. I consider the question still very much open and expect I will write more about it.
That’s my weekly goal met.

An abstract tangent which could be fun to explore:
Should everyone who goes to colonise Mars have children?

CONTEXT: I don’t know if my questions below are that good or really worth considering. It’s more just a brainstorm than anything.

This makes sense. I failed to consider all the philosophy stuff, and prerequisites, that someone could implement in a piecemiel way. It’s not all or nothing. There are many valuable sub-skills.

Thinking about this has just made me curious about breakpoints in the philosophy learning process. In https://curi.us/2417-learning-skills-is-non-linear , you talk about breakpoints in the learning process. What are some of the breakpoints that someone might aim for in learning philosophy? What would be a way of testing pass/fail on having made it past a breakpoint? Is there a certain point where reading comprehension goes way up? What does that look like or feel like?

What does passing a breakpoint in understanding Popperian epistemology look like? Which pieces have to come together to make that happen? I assume it includes all the philosphy prerequisites. Are there specific concepts that need to be in place to make the knowledge usable?

I can think of some breakpoint examples with skills like typing (e.g. when you no longer have to look at the key board, or when you start executing muli-key combos automatically).

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.

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

Project notes

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.

I’ve wanted a way to export all content from a topic and just looked into it again and found two options:

Guide: View Entire Topic on One Page or Export Topic Content

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My impression of the end of the Correntin discussion, without rereading, is he would give a reason for leaving, I’d point out why it’s false or bad, and then he’d give a different reason, which I’d also criticize, and then he’d just switch to a new reason. It was a succession of novel reasons, that could not stand up to criticism, introduced at the end. (A couple were things he’d mentioned previously, but had not made a big deal about, said were dealbreakers or focused the discussion – or else they would have been addressed more earlier. Bringing them up as discussion-enders is a new, different thing than the previous mentions.)

I think that means the reasons he gave were excuses, often made carelessly and ad hoc, never his real reasons.

The part that stood out to the most was when he said basically “OK I was lying to you and hiding my real reason, which is that I found some dirt on you by searching for you on Less Wrong”. But then when I responded to that, he dropped it and said something else and still left, so I think he was lying there too. I think it’s really bad to say you’re coming clean and finally being honest about what’s really going on, but to actually just be lying again and using your confession as just another manipulative tactic.

I’ve had similar issues with other people. I think what they want is sanction. They want me to “agree to disagree” or otherwise give them my approval, rather than think “you’re welcome to leave but I’m going to consider you irrational and closed to debate, just like ~everyone else with your beliefs”. So the point isn’t that they are particularly bad (they aren’t!); it’s just that if they won’t talk and they don’t know of anyone else on their side who will, then their side looks bad/irrational (due to actually being bad/irrational) – there is a real problem there which is why I will reach a negative judgment.

People seem to want a way out without a negative judgment for them or their side/cause, and they’ll behave badly trying (ineffectively and counter-productively) to get it (e.g. they’ll be dishonest instead of just directly talking about the problem, so then I end up arguing with them instead of helping with problem solving – it’s really hard to help someone with a problem they won’t admit to having). Also basically I think some negative judgment is deserved – not relative to other people or causes, but in absolute or objective terms. If they deserve a negative judgment in reality but don’t want it, then it leads to evasion…

Aubrey de Grey almost ended our discussion early on like many prestigious, “busy” “intellectuals” would. But I said something like, loosely and from memory, “It’s no problem if you don’t have time to talk to me personally. Can you just direct me to anything to read, or anyone to talk to, so I can find out why you’re right?” And since he had no texts or people that argued his beliefs well, he then ended up talking to me a large amount instead…

That says something good about Aubrey de Grey btw (which I mention because I formed a very negative view of him due to his sex scandal, his response to it, and some other reasons like at that time I found out more stuff about what he’d been doing for the last decade like getting drunk a lot…). Most people will just say “just go to a library” or “go to google scholar” or something dumb instead of recommending any specific sources. Then if I do that and have lots of criticism of what I find, they can just say I found the wrong things and take no responsibility for it because they never endorsed anything in particular. Or they can say that those criticisms obviously were already thought of by the smart people working in the field and they’re answered in unspecified other texts. Or they can say those criticisms seem weak not strong – the quantities in weighted factor evaluations are basically arbitrary/subjective so people can just ignore any criticism they want to and say it’s a small negative, and the good stuff for their side is big, so their side is still winning even if they offer no rebuttal.

I wanted to engage with this answer a bit more (particularly as I’ve accepted it as an answer to one of my questions).

I had some intuitive conflicts with it but was able to resolve them myself. I thought it might be useful to go into them and discuss them openly. I think I have intuitive conflicts that I silently resolve fairly often and maybe I am overestimating how well I am resolving my intuitions.

I’m going to label my thoughts MCI and MCA (intuition and answer, respectively).

So my in response to the first quote above:
MCI - That sounds great in an ideal world but I can’t imagine a job I’d have no conflicts about, even if I loved the work I’d still likely have conflicts with some of the people involved.
MCA - Conflicts aren’t just between you right now and possible futures. Your ideas can change and you can resolve conflicts internally.
MCI - Resolving conflicts internally can be really hard. I’m worried that I’ll get into a situation where I have so many conflicts that I don’t have time to resolve them and start falling apart. I’m worried that you’ll make me keep going even when I’m unhappy.
MCA - I can’t guarantee that a situation with a lot of hard conflicts wont happen. I know I’ve been mean before and not taken care of you. I’m trying to get better at taking you seriously. When I get overwhelmed I can forget to talk to you. I’m trying to make better choices so I don’t get overwhelmed.
MCI - You always get overwhelmed. You take on too much and try to do too much and you suck at picking what to do or realising how much work things will take until it’s too late.
MCA - I’ve been developing a system of deterioration red flags. If my eating habits or self-care start getting bad I’m more aware that it means you’re trying to tell me something. When that starts happening I stop what I’m doing and focus on you.
MCI - You don’t always, you suck at it. You make excuses to keep going and ignore me. Even if you didn’t, sometimes work might require you to keep going.
MCA - It’s both of us that make excuses. It’s not something I always think through.
(introducing MCP - intuition/panic)
MCP - THERE’S NO TIME DON’T EVER STOP
MCI - I hate that guy.
MCA - There IS time now, MCP. The last few years got out of hand. We learned a lot. I know a lot better how many big things I can be doing at once now. I don’t want to try that again. I’m going to pick one big thing to do at a time, and that will leave me with free time to look after us.
MCP - okay
MCI - Work might still require more.
MCA - Okay, so we need work that doesn’t demand more. That’s something we need to find out before agreeing to any work.
MCI - Okay.

I cut this short, I could talk to myself a lot more, but I think that was the major resistance.

So taking a general point from that:
Do work that fits with self-care/well-being needs and be up front about those needs to make expectations clear if there’s sign of a conflict.

There’s part of me that wants “my kind of people” or something like that. But I don’t think I’ve found any people who are “my kind”. I guess tribalist people want that and probably have the same problem of struggling to find their kind, so try to solve it conforming to an existing group/suppressing themselves to fit in. I guess people who come here and cargo cult might be thinking something similar.

I guess “my kind of people” is actually a non-existent thing (in the sense of people I agree with/get on with all the time). Even if there was a person who was super like me at the same place and time, we’d diverge afterwards on our own lives.

A more useful thing to look for is people who I don’t have major disagreements with (e.g. major moral issues). They’ll always be some different ideas, and it’s not impossible that major disagreements could rise owing to individual changes.

So a more useful idea of “my kind of people” could be “people I don’t have major moral disagreements with right now”, but it needs the clear expectation that there are still going to be disagreements and that people could change and start having major moral disagreements later.

My conclusion from that chain of thought is: There’s no “kind of people” that will want me in their group in a way that allows free thought. The only “kind of people” I should care to keep in my life are people who I currently have no major moral disagreements with, and I think that’s a good kind of people to value.

Another thing they might be thinking is they think you want them to leave (owing to the number of disagreements and the amount of criticism which they interpret as a kind of rejection) and they find it hard to understand why you aren’t agreeing with them leaving. Maybe it’s a kind of tribalist thinking which they project onto you - they think they’ve been rejected from the “in” group and want you to at least agree with that.

I guess they could end up thinking they’re stuck/trapped, and don’t know what path will lead to some sort of agreement that they’re willing to pay for (i.e. that they can reach in an amount of time they want to spend) and having some sort of agreement would help close the thread in their minds.

I guess there’s part of me that’s worried about this possibility here - that I want to leave a conversation because I disagree but don’t know how to proceed with that.

I checked through your intuition-related articles and this one seems to be very relevant.

I think when people have arguments sometimes they think (or at least suspect) the other guy is being a jerk. In that sort of situation it can be a bit scary to say something like “I have an intuitive conflict”. It’s kind of like a situation where someone is scared of finding out their test results for a scary disease, even though it’s a lot better to know if it’s there so treatment can start. If someone suspects an interlocutor is a jerk, saying “I have an intuitive conflict” is a jerk-test, and they might be a nasty jerk in response. Even though that would then allow the treatment to begin (i.e. ending the conversation and moving on) it’s still kind of scary to do.

I don’t think I fully understand that kind of fear. I have things like that which I sometimes avoid before doing them later (either because it stops being scary, or because I’m under time pressure and make myself do it).

Having a conflict with a coworker is different than being conflicted about your career. All parts of you may be satisfied with the career choice despite some imperfect or even lame coworkers.

Right, individual co-workers aren’t essential to an entire career. Even if one specific job has one specific co-worker who is a problem and there’s doesn’t seem to be a way to do anything about it, that doesn’t ruin the whole career idea.

People like that would only affect the whole career idea if there was some part of that career that made people like that fundamentally part of it (e.g. a career where dishonesty with clients or even colleagues is an advantage).

I’m not sure I’d call them all excuses.

I think it’s possible that some of them were real reasons, but as a result of one reason or another he concluded the conversation would never reach a conclusion and would just go in circles of unresolved disagreements. I don’t think this is uncommon dealing with people generally, so I think it’s possible he concluded it was happening again so there was no point trying to address everything or keep discussing.

More generally I have a guess that there’s a reason for leaving CF (though I don’t think it’s specific to CF, rather any in-depth discussion) that may be behind some of it:
Thinking that some people will argue pointlessly or endlessly in circles for the sake of it
Having some idea about indicators in a conversation for someone who is arguing pointlessly/endlessly

Possibly a root cause behind that is getting overwhelmed. Having big complex discussions is hard work, and “it’s just going in circles” is an out to avoid an overwhelmingly complex discussion.

I’m going to write about these questions:

Analysing the question

My last question here is arguably a complicated version of “Should I do good?”, which I have an immediate intuitive answer to - yes!

But that doesn’t account for the full question - about doing good in “the world at large”. I guess that’s really a question of “is the world good?”, because I live in the world and of course need it to continue existing and I want to see it improve. I was talking about Dominique Francon recently, she had concluded that the world was bad and so she shouldn’t try to help. She just amused herself, and when she met someone good she couldn’t believe it at first and even when she couldn’t deny it any more she went on trying to stop him from doing good because she didn’t think the world was worth it.

My point is: I’m questioning if the world is good for a reason. I think this is some elements of a past me that was very cynical and pessimistic and hopeless. I think that past me had decided the world was bad and it wasn’t worth trying to improve. I can’t say I think the world is all good now, but I do think that it can be improved. Maybe it’s a losing battle, but if it’s worth trying to do anything it’s worth trying to improve the world.

So I think it’s important to do some good in the world. I don’t necessarily mean that in some sort of charitable sense (though I’m not ruling that out). Creating good ideas, spreading good ideas, protecting people, improving health, helping productivity, entertaining/making people happy (in a good way, I don’t consider e.g. exploiting people with bad gambling/drug/sex habits to be a good thing even though it may make them happy).

I think how much someone gets paid is a rough estimate of how much good they’re doing/how much impact they’re having, as long as it isn’t exploiting/destroying/degrading or in some other way immoral.

I looked for some other ideas or articles around the subject.

Unidentified Cause X

I think this is interesting (that people in general may have some sort of major moral flaw and no-one has even thought of it yet). I think choosing a life path in such a way that your life is compatible with being radically altered is valuable - e.g. if someone chose a career but found out after a decade of work that it was actually really bad, it would be even worse if they were so entrenched in that career that it would nearly destroy the rest of their life to leave it. I think academics, career politicians and influencers can suffer from this problem, becoming dependent on the system to the point where they struggle to find other kinds of work that allow them to perform vital functions like supporting their family.
(reminds me of The Matrix quote, “And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”)

I think EA is actually creating “cause X” with their position on animals.
From the article:

The persecution of animals today, what we see over and over again is how easy it is for people to be oblivious to serious moral problems.

They seem to be oblivious to the moral problem of calling the way animals are treated as “persecution”. They hold back humanity (the only good that is known to exist), waste effort protecting biological automata from “suffering” that hampers human progress with medicine and food creation. The kind of idea that humans and animals are so similar is also pretty bad, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it results in them making a bunch of other mistakes like how they think about the mind and emotions, and how they could find analogies in animals and other life forms to take lessons from.

Office job vs effective career

Another article from EA:

This is not so bad in it’s conclusions, though it still bases quite a few conclusions just on feelings. I think in principle I agree with the comparison of “office job” vs “effective career”, that either choice is doing good, and that if someone picks “effective career” to have more impact but ends up unhappy with the work it’s a mistake (as Elliot explained well). Though I think I wouldn’t ask EA what type of career would be effective or what causes are good to donate to.

I’m getting the impression that EA content is typically bad in having some serious mistakes as a premise or emotional reasoning. It’s alarming how many people (such as Corentin) commit drastic amounts of effort to them or their causes. I’m yet to turn up a result from EA that I think is very well thought out.

Good effective careers

I think this is an interesting article:

It’s not so relevant to me (not US citizen) but it lists some career choices which can have good positive impact and are in some cases also well paid on average, I think these are better places to focus if someone wants to pursue an “effective career” specifically. Working for charities is often not a very high-skill job, and people who have the options and aspiration to aim for a more skilled career should do so.

Earn to give as a way to do good

I think this article is also interesting and talks about why to “earn to give” (or as mentioned earlier “office job” instead of “effective career”):

I think it makes a lot of good points. I like this one in particular, as it allows much more flexibility and error-correction, and is one of the many under-acknowledged benefits of capitalism:

The third and most important consideration is that charities vary tremendously in the amount of good they do with the money they receive. For example, it costs about $40,000 to train and provide a guide dog for one person, but it costs less than $25 to cure one person of sight-destroying trachoma. For the cost of improving the life of one person with blindness, you can cure 1,000 people of it.
This matters because if you decide to work in the charity sector, you’re rather limited. You can only change jobs so many times, and it’s unlikely that you can work for only the very best charities. In contrast, if you earn to give, you can donate anywhere, preferably to the most cost-effective charities, and change your donations as often as you like.

Other context

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtedBLdducritm8y6/optimal-employment
I think the section on employment biases is interesting. I think it highlights some deeper issues that can be easy to overlook in choosing a career, particularly stress, location and actual buying power.
Lots of high paying jobs are very demanding in terms of stress, hours and performance requirements. This is really important to consider when choosing a career, as if someone has major life goals (e.g. raising children) a career like that will get in the way.
Considering actual buying power and location is really important - even staying within one’s country of origin, there can be different locations to live and work that may give better buying power even at lower incomes.

Summing up

  • Doing good is important, but there are lots of mistaken ideas about what counts as “good”. Lots of careers can do good in ways that people might not realise or consider “good” because of misconceptions about what is a good cause.
  • A career which has some flexibility - that is not entrenching and allows career flexibility - avoids the catastrophic risk of being stuck doing something that you later realise is bad.
  • Doing work that doesn’t make much difference (as long as it isn’t actively bad) still leaves the possibly more effective option of donating to worthwhile causes.
  • It’s important to consider other goals as some careers are incompatible with other major aspirations in life owing to time/stress/location/commute demands.
  • Location can make a huge difference to the living costs, and lower paid less demanding jobs can still result in better buying power with certain changes in location, or even because some jobs have lifestyle requirements. So it’s important to decide if changing location is an option, or if not why not, and look at other associated costs that come with a job.

Project notes

This is my goal met for the week.

I’ve provisionally put my thoughts starting from this quote into an article on my new blog. I rewrote some areas of it. I’m going to use the blog as a place to write up my thoughts about the main questions I’m asking myself here, plus probably some other articles I’m interested in writing.

I’ve consistently failed to meet this part of my goal (I forgot about it).

I’ve been picking questions to answer on whim. Sometimes I’ve had a specific subject in mind but not clearly enough to state it.

Having a question I plan to consider isn’t a commitment to posting on that subject, it’s just trying to think ahead about this more since it’s a pretty important long-term goal.

My goal question to write about this week is: Why do people leave CF?
I plan to look at my analysis of the Corentin discussion, the comments of others, possibly look at some of the other examples Elliot provided, and start writing some conclusions.

Integrating some of my earlier comments about this project question:

I’ve made the following list primarily based on my notes from my earlier post:

I don’t think these are necessarily true reasons that Corentin in particular chose to leave. But I think they are possible reasons that someone might leave.

  • Broad cause: Debate pessimism
    • Overconfident expectation of how quickly conflicts of ideas can be honestly resolved or how easy accurate communication is.
      • Possible sub-cause: Convinced by cultural influences such as TV debates which are more about each side expressing their point of view, but not actually fully convincing anyone, and concluding this is the best existing form of discussion.
      • Possible sub-cause: Lack of debating skill or appreciation of how much improvement there is, leading to overwhelm.
      • Possible sub-cause: Impatience, the sense that there are too many things to do and discussion isn’t profitable enough by comparison.
      • Possible sub-cause: Lack of skill in managing overwhelm and breaking tasks down into manageable sub-tasks.
      • Possible sub-cause: Lack of skill in self-reflection and understanding how to communicate intuitive disagreement.
      • Possible sub-cause: Scheduling conflicts, commitments in life that preclude taking time to debate or study in ways that aren’t part of their commitments.
        • Possible solution: Concrete examples that discussions can be solved effectively, of how much improvement potential there is, and the benefit of improvement.
        • Possible solution: Concrete guidance on managing overwhelm and how to break big hard tasks into smaller manageable ones.
  • Broad cause: Authoritarian thinking
    • Convinced that new ideas need an authority to accept them, so not open to honest discussion and criticism.
      • Possible sub-cause: Insecurity about being making decisions independently, seeking safety in the authority/tribe/group.
      • Possible sub-cause: Collective thinking, convinced that group votes are the best way of finding true ideas or rejecting false ideas (similar: statistical thinking, convinced by Bayesian epistemology)
        • Possible solution: Difficult! If someone needs an authority to accept an idea, better ideas that don’t play to authority will have obstacles. I don’t have a straightforward answer here. I think it’s possible to get in under the authoritarian thinking to uproot it in theory.
  • Broad cause: Subjectivism
    • Convinced that truth is subjective and/or “nothing is true”, so there’s no point to trying to pursue truth and honesty.
      • Possible sub-cause: Authoritarian thinking, uncritically accepting subjectivist ideas owing to status or other similar reasons.
        • Possible solution: Difficult! If someone believes nothing is true, they have a ready-loaded response to reject any new idea. Again I think it’s possible that there’s some way of uprooting the misconception but don’t have a straightforward answer.
  • Broad cause: Arrogance
    • Convinced they know enough/they don’t have any bad ideas. Generally: dishonesty.
      • Possible sub-cause: Insecurity, the need to think their current ideas are infallible is an evasion and excuse to avoid the uncertainty of making decisions.
      • Possible sub-cause: Defensiveness, faced with someone who is a better thinker and/or debater they feel threatened or scared that they’re not good enough (in life, in general, etc) if they acknowledge mistakes so they entrench their position.
      • Possible sub-cause: Status seeking, convinced that they need to appear to be right for social status/profit reasons.
        • Possible solution: Difficult, but avoiding direct criticism and presenting good ideas in an impersonal way so that the arrogant person can consider it privately (which may trigger less arrogance) may be more effective than direct criticism.

I’m interested in countering reasons people leave because my past engagement with FI/curi has been infrequent and erratic and there could be related reasons for that. I think I’m overall better off staying active here as it helps me avoid deceiving myself. It would also be beneficial (to me directly, and to the pursuit of truth and betterment of humanity in general) if more good people could be convinced of this.

I think this list covers a lot of bases. There may be more to add (or possibly some reorganising of groups) which I might find studying the other examples Elliot provided or further analysis of Elliot’s additional post. (links mainly so I can easily find them later)

I don’t plan to make this into an article on my blog in it’s current form. I think it would be misleading about CF to post about why people leave it out of context.
I might instead write an unambiguously pro-CF article that’s related but focuses on the solutions. Such as writing about why people should join CF and stick around, or writing about why people evade serious discussion and how and why they can do better.

Project notes

Goal completed for the week.

Next week I plan to write about this question:

I think this question is misguided now. I think some sort of subconscious idea about wanting to treat CF and/or Elliot as the saviour and final answer to my problems was behind it. I think that’s really bad, it’s a part of me I’ve improved a lot but still exists. I guess it’s some sort of frustration or anxiety asking “why is everything so hard?” and wanting easy answers. It’s related to trying to do too much, to getting overwhelmed, and to rushing and messing up.

I think there’s a better, deeper question which the original question is adjacent to:

How should someone decide how to make decisions based on the advice of people they only know online?

One reason I think this is better because it has reach. I think there are a lot of people who go to strangers online to make decisions for them and can get really terrible guidance because the strangers couldn’t see or understand the full context of the problems and/or aren’t open about what agenda or values they have.

Having a good approach to getting advice about life choices from strangers is important, as they wont know things about a person’s life to look for patterns or problems that may be root causes that are better to solve.

I couldn’t find any direct answers to this question elsewhere, but there are a few articles on related subjects.
https://medium.com/rachael-writes/why-we-all-need-to-stop-asking-for-advice-online-f1f7b5c74958

It does make some useful points, I think (context of this excerpt is taking advice online on parenting).

At the very least you should narrow things down. Instead of posting in a local moms group with 8,000 members, find a more specific group, whether it’s Unconventional Parenting, Single Parenting, Foster Parenting or something else.

It’s certainly worth being highly discriminating with who to aim the question at (though that can result in someone fooling themselves by asking in an echo chamber).

Do your own research, and don’t treat all websites equally. There’s a huge difference between reading information about the safety of medication on the CDC or FDA website and reading it on a website someone posted in crunchy parenting forum that promotes or sells natural health products has an anti-vaccine/anti-western medicine bias. A lot of those websites are really good at making the things they’re saying look legit, but when you dig a little bit deeper, they are fake/propaganda/untrustworthy.

Broadly, yes (but I’d treat the CDC and FDA with just as much scrutiny).

What is the Internet Good For?
The internet is not a good place to seek advice, but that doesn’t make it worthless. It also has its strong suits.

The section that follows this heading is overall not too bad.

Overall I don’t think this article is very good. I think it tries to replace submitting one’s reason to strangers with submitting one’s reason to authorities. I think it also treats intuition as an authority Though I think it could be a lot worse - I would expect doing what someone with a medical degree says about a medical problem, instead of what wiki and strangers say, will go wrong much less often. And it does address that somewhat.

This following post is about dating advice specifically, but I think has some important related points.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/sqbwf1/stop_taking_dating_advice_from_random_people_on/

There’s so many different people in the world, literally any dating style can work. Remember, you’re not supposed to be looking for anyone, you’re looking for the one.

I think there’s so much deep subconscious stuff going on when it comes to life choices like who to date (or whether to pursue romance at all), what career to have, whether to have children, what investments to make (i.e. risk management and exposure needs) and so many other things that it’s important to keep that in mind when taking advice from strangers. There’s also physical stuff - appearance, health, age, body language, historical behavior, and other cues that people online might never notice and may be highly relevant.

Curiosity – [Excerpt] Personal advice means advice that is cont...

It’s not very well written but I doubt Elliot cares very much as it’s 20 years old and an excerpt from something else obviously written quickly. I don’t think he’d write something that way today (even for informal posts). I think the point is clear enough and touches on the subject.

I think the degree to which a subject is personal is a decent measure of the degree to which online advice should be taken cautiously. Some examples:

  • Asking someone online “what is the year?” is very impersonal and generally not going to go wrong.
  • Asking someone “what is the weather like?” is more personal and requires some context like location and common usage of words (like how rainy “very rainy” is).
  • Finally asking “what shoes should I wear?” is a lot more personal and requires a lot more stuff for useful answers like job/activity/foot size/fashion preference/foot health/budget.

The asker needs to understand all the contextual requirements and personal details that are relevant to get good answers, and if relying on talking to people online people who answer might miss context that the asker doesn’t know the relevance of.

This is just some first thoughts on this subject, I’ll think about it some more and write something that answers the new question better.

I think it would be good to write up my final answer to this subject as an article for my blog. It seems like something a lot of people might benefit from a good answer to.

Project notes

That’s my goal for the week.

Next week I plan to write about this question:

Thinking about my project question.

Thinking about this question, I went to the Unbounded category and read a few posts there.

I guessed that to get a sense for the kind of problems someone could have there would be easiest to find in the topics with a lot of replies, so I sorted by post count and looked at the top topics. That still left quite a few options with a lot of replies, so I only looked at posts written by people other than Elliot as I think those are most relevant to the question.

Of those, the ones that seem to result in the biggest problems. I guess what I mean by “biggest problems” is not stuff like asking for clarifications or pointing out mistakes, but getting seriously into meta issues (which is basically the difference between unbounded and others).

Some of the topics I looked at and some brief notes:

This begins with Justin and Max talking about morality. It gets quite bogged down with a lot of complexity and lots of details. Then meta issues started coming in about Max being evasive/defensive or making ad-hoc arguments. He also starts talking about not having enough time, implying the discussion is placing a lot of burden on him to make progress. I don’t know if that’s generally difficult for people, but I think I’d find it difficult if I was in Max’s position. He takes ~3 months to come back and write a conclusion. This seems like a really long delay! But I checked through his activity at the time and he was active elsewhere and working on related meta issues (like defensiveness).

Answering the question:

From this thread, some criteria for using Unbound:

  • Having a good handle on evasiveness/defensiveness. Having a reasonable grasp of being able to self-identify it.
  • Able to identify when progress is blocked, and take reasonable steps to identify the underlying issue and work on that.

This seems to be a tangent that Max started following some time after the above topic. Max seems to get stuck in tangles again and tries only a little to bring it into focus. My sense is the main substance of the topic and the replies Max gets are about overreaching (about CF/BoI/Oism knowledge). I don’t think there’s a substantial effort to address the overreaching here (but there may be elsewhere).

Answering the question:

  • I think getting tangled/having too many different subjects in a thread is a likely problem in Unbounded. Being aware of this and being able to decide well when to branch subjects off the main topic seems valuable.

I think this topic kinda sputters out without really getting to the point. It’s mostly meta stuff. Maybe anon23 got distracted with meta stuff and lost track of the goal, or got discouraged from talking about it because they didn’t get replies about it? I doubt that they stopped caring about the topic as it seems pretty important but they only really said a couple of things about it after the initial post.

Answering the question:

  • A possible skill of note there (though not related entirely to Unbounded) is: You can’t expect anyone else to carry a subject for you. It’s worth thinking about topic review processes: Do you want responses? If so and you’re not getting them, how can you make it more valuable for others to respond? Are you depending on others to follow the original goal? How can you proceed without relying on external input?

This one goes along pretty linearly for the most part, then jumps the rails at the end (starting at post 43). Something seems to connect wrong with Alan and the discussion never reaches a conclusion (in the topic). It’s a bit too light on details to work out why it went that way with much confidence, broadly Alan seems to get defensive.The content starting from 43 is all pretty much on topic and I think would be reasonable to find in non-Unbounded topics too, so this isn’t related to Unbounded specifically.

Answering the question:

  • Though not really about anything particular to Unbounded in this case, I think defensiveness seems to be a reasonable thing to be extra vigilant for in Unbounded. A particular mindset is required; one of not having a specific agenda for the subject or being invested in it going a specific way.

One final thought about Unbounded for now:

  • Start small and contained. The more complex a subject is the more possible tangents it can spawn.

Project notes

These are my first notes on this subject. There are still a lot more Unbounded topics to look at that may be informative. I looked at mostly long topics, which in hindsight might have been a mistake as they took a long time even skimming. I might find more by looking through a bunch of short topics which possibly got derailed or went very meta very quickly.

I think I do go off on elaborate tangents about subjects sometimes so I see it as something I’ll face in Unbounded. This whole project thread is itself a mess of questions/tangents that I may start branching off into new topics as I explore each question/tangent further. For now I’m going to keep preliminary notes like this within the topic, I’ll consider starting tangent topics for when I start writing in depth answers based on the notes.

That’s my goal met for the week.

Next week I aim to write about this question (which replaces one of the original questions):

I’ll start thinking about how to write up something as an answer based on my notes so far.

Answering this question.

Which after some consideration I replaced with this question and it’s connected notes.

I’m finding it difficult to write about this question in an impersonal way, as it entangles with some intuitive stuff for me that I’m not sure I have the right words for yet. This may be more like a stream of consciousness.

Part of my inner conflicts on this is, I think, trying to find a reliable way to accept answers. I think it’s connecting to some authoritarian-type ideas, trying to find a way to use some perfect method X to solve problems.

In principle I have what I think is an acceptable method X - that is, to select the ideas/answers that have not been successfully criticised. To explore and refute criticisms, or create new ideas in response to them.

There’s a part of me saying something like “but you haven’t asked everyone yet, you could have missed something”, which can be confusing and overwhelming. There’s no practical way of asking literally everyone for their answer to a problem. So when opening up discussion to people in general (rather than keeping in a closed system with possibly very limited access to good ideas) I guess this part of me immediately makes the problem unmanageably large.

It’s a part of me that isn’t always active, sometimes it isn’t active at all. For some reason I’m not sure about, it’s particularly active with this question.

Some other parts of me try to find answers in bad things. E.g. finding a person who’s judgement I can take on, or by trying to find ways to denigrate some people to limit the pool of people to talk to. I don’t want these parts of me to be the best answers I have to for trying to manage discussing ideas in public.

Considering this question reminded me of one of Elliot’s article:

I think this problem is a kind of bottleneck for me. A significant part of me is trying to find a perfect way of trying to get the best possible advice and make the best possible decision based on it, far beyond a “good enough” outcome.

The intuition behind “best possible” there is not a realistic one, it’s by some unrealistic imagined and not even very clearly defined perfection. Something where the goalposts could be very easily moved without even realising it. For reference I’m going to call this kind of thinking “mystic perfectionism”.

Even if I thought that all the best ideas in the world could only be found on CF, and the people who have them are willing to put the effort in to write them/provide them for me (including possibly me being convinced to pay for it), this mystic perfectionism would still be saying “you don’t know everyone else in the world, you might have missed someone”.

I don’t think this mystic perfectionism is misguided in it’s intent - it’s trying to find the truth. But it’s method is bad, and comes with a lot of empty worry with no clear cause.

I think I need some sort of “good enough” pass/fail approach to answer this mystic perfectionism. And this answer may be part of or the entire answer to the question I’m writing about.

My stream of consciousness is drying up here so I’m going to make some rough guesses about possible methods and my current main thoughts. These are not attempts to pick a final answer - just making some notes for next time.

Measures for picking a “good enough” method to get useful advice:

  • Think about who would know about the subject. Target exploration there. E.g. a programming forum/discussion group for code-related problems. CF is a useful universal answer here as truth seeking and critical thinking are universal goods. It’s good to mention which other sources have been targeted to find answers.
  • The problem may be about knowing how much work looking for answers/knowledgeable people is enough work. A possible method here is, if after searching for a while if you stop seeing new answers/criticisms to a problem/idea maybe 10+ times in a row it may be worth stopping and accepting the results so far as the best found.
  • Take these best results and try to answer them. Follow tangents. Look for others answers to these problems too, and create some answers too.
  • If there is some sort of flaw with all the answers, try to think of a solution that doesn’t have that flaw. Failing that, think about the flaws - are some of them acceptable for the benefit of having an otherwise useful answer? Consider IGC charts to analyse the competing ideas.
  • Discuss this analysis of the different answers.
  • Make a decisions of your own. Not only is it not good to seek out someone else’s answer to replace your own thinking with, people who want to get that kind of submission are not great thinkers.
  • Mystic perfectionism note: How do you know you’ve done enough of all of this? This hasn’t solved this underlying intuitive conflict that I have. Part of the problem is, doing this for everything seems like it would make it impossible to get anything done. It may be better to just make a choice of some method or other, try it out for a while, and then look at how it worked out. That seems like a better option than following some mystic perfectionism.

Project notes

That’s my project goal for the week.

Next week I plan to write about this question more, particularly as it’s been an active issue for me this week:

Side note: I have some other ongoing conversations elsewhere on this forum which I haven’t read yet, I plan to get to them in the next day or two. This isn’t entirely about posting reluctance - I’ve been busy with another project this week which I wanted to get finished and has taken up almost all of my conscious thought.