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Exploit your natural motivations

There's a relevant concept that I keep meaning to write about, which I could summarize as: create gradients towards your long-term aspirations.

Humans are general intelligences, and one of the core properties of general intelligence is not being a greedy-optimization algorithm:

• We can pursue long-term goals even when each individual step towards them is not pleasurable-in-itself (such as suffering through university to get a degree in a field jobs in which require it).
• We can force ourselves out of local maxima (such as quitting a job you hate and changing careers, even though it'd mean a period of life filled with uncertainty and anxieties).
• We can build world-models, use them to infer the shapes of our value functions, and plot a path towards their global maximum, even if it requires passing through negative-reward regions (such as engaging in self-reflection and exploration, then figuring out which vocation would be most suitable to a person-like-you).

However, it's hard. We're hybrid systems, combining generally-intelligent planning modules with greedy RL circuitry. The greedy RL circuitry holds a lot of sway. If you keep forcing yourself to do something it assigns negative rewards to, it's going to update your plan-making modules until they stop doing that.

It is much, much easier to keep doing something if every instance of it is pleasurable in itself. If the reward is instead sparse and infrequent, you'd need a lot of "willpower" to keep going (to counteract the negative updates), and accumulating that is a hard problem in itself.

So the natural solution is to plot, or create, a path towards the long-term aspiration such that motion along it would involve receiving immediate positive feedback from your learned and innate reward functions.

A lot of productivity advice reduces to it:

• Breaking the long-term task into yearly, monthly, and daily subgoals, such that you can feel accomplishment on a frequent basis (instead of only at the end).
• Using "cross-domain success loops": simultaneously work on several projects, such that you accomplish something worthwhile along at least one of those tracks frequently, and can then harness the momentum from the success along one track into the motivation for continuing the work along other tracks.
  • I. e., sort of trick your reward system into confusing where exactly the reward is coming from.
  • (I think there was an LW post about this, but I don't remember how to find it.)
• Eating something tasty, or going to a party, or otherwise "indulging" yourself, every time you do something that contributes to your long-term aspiration.
• Finding ways to make the process at least somewhat enjoyable, through e. g. environmental factors, such as working in a pleasant place, putting on music, using tools that feel satisfying to use, or doing small work-related rituals that you find amusing.
• Creating social rewards and punishments, such as:
  • Joining a community focused on pursuing the same aspiration as you.
  • Finding "workout buddies".
  • Having friends who'd hold you accountable if you slack off.
  • Having friends who'd cheer you on if you succeed.
• And, as in Shoshannah's post: searching for activities that are innately enjoyable and happen to move you in the direction of your aspirations.

None of the specific examples here are likely to work for you (they didn't for me). But you might be able to design or find an instance of that general trick that fits you!

(Or maybe not. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and go through a rewardless stretch of landscape, if you're not willing to budge on your goal/aspiration.)

Other relevant posts:

• Venkatesh Rao's The Calculus of Grit. It argues for ignoring extrinsic "disciplinary boundaries" (professions, fields) when choosing your long-term aspirations, and instead following an "internal" navigation system when mapping out the shape of the kind-of-thing that someone-like-you is well-suited to doing.
  • Note that this advice goes further than Shoshannah's: in this case, you don't exert any (conscious) control even over the direction you'd like to go, much less your "goal".
  • It's likely to be easier, but the trade-off should be clear.
• John Wentworth's Plans Are Predictions, Not Optimization Targets [LW · GW]. This connection is a bit more rough, but: that post can be generalized to note that any explicit life goals you set for yourself should often be treated as predictions about what goal you should pursue. Recognizing that, you might instead choose to "pursue your goal-in-expectation", which might be similar to Shoshannah's point about "picking a direction, not a goal".

No IMO.

(I'm also skeptical of competitiveness with expert jailbreakers, but this isn't a crux.)

That breakdown is fiction dictated by the regulator.

Your comment would have more validity had the market not corrected the dislocation created by Theo. It took three weeks, but the market eventually corrected itself. 

Age and popularity of an idea or practice have some predictive power as to how useful it has been.  Old and surviving is some evidence.  Popular is some evidence.  Old and NOT popular is conflicting evidence - it's useful (or at least not very harmful) to some, perhaps limited by context or covariant factors that don't apply elsewhere.  

Whether your interpretation of a practice will get benefits for you should probably be determined by more specific analysis than "it worked for a small set of people in a very different environment, and never caught on universally".

Organizations and communities can also face hostile telepaths. My pet theory that sort of crystalized while reading this is that p-hacking is academia’s response to a hostile telepath that banned publication of negative results.

This of course sucks for non traditional researchers and especially journalists who don’t even subconsciously know that p=0.05002 r=1e-7 “breakthrough in finding relationship between milk consumption and toenail fungus” is code for “We have conclusively found no effect and want to broadcast to the community that there is no effect here; yet we cannot ever consciously acknowledging that we found nothing because our mortgages depend on fooling a hostile telepath into believing this is something”

This claim looks like it's implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don't?

I'm a bit surprised this is the crux for you. Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field's gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over. (There's also things you could do in addition to gatekeeping. See Selective, Corrective, Structural: Three Ways of Making Social Systems Work [LW · GW])

(This doesn't mean smaller research communities automatically have good gatekeeping or other mechanisms, but it doesn't feel like a very confusing or mysterious problem on how to do better)

Claude probably read that material right? If it finds my observations unique and serious then maybe they are unique and serious? I'll share other chat next time..

Even just writing down loose associations and your emotional state is enough; that's how you get the ball rolling. Try it for two weeks even if it feels useless. Unless you're taking antidepressants in which case this might actually be ineffective. I know this doesn't sound worthwhile, but I know from experience (mine and others) that it usually works.

How can I put little effort but be perceived like someone worth listening? I thought announcing a monetary prize for someone who could find error in my reasoning 😅