Q: What has Rationality Done for You?

The reason it's important is because it counts as basic mental maintenance, just as eating reasonably and exercising a bit and so on are basic bodily maintenance. You cannot achieve any goal without basic self-care.

For the solving friendly AI problem in particular: the current leader in the field has noticed his work suffers if he doesn't allow play time. You are allowed play time.

You are not a moral failure for not personally achieving an arbitrary degree of moral perfection.

You sound depressed, which would mean your hardware was even more corrupt and biased than usual. This won't help achieve a positive Singularity either. Driving yourself crazier with guilt at not being able to work for a positive Singularity won't help your effectiveness, so you need to stop doing that.

You are allowed to rest and play. You need to let yourself rest. Take a deep breath! Sleep! Go on holiday! Talk to friends you trust! See your doctor! Please do something. You sound like you are dashing your mind to pieces against the rock of the profoundly difficult, and you are not under any obligation to do such a thing, to punish yourself so.

As a result of this thinking, are you devoting every moment of your time and every Joule of your energy towards avoiding a negative Singularity?

No?

No, me neither. If I were to reason this way, the inevitable result for me would be that I couldn't bear to think about it at all and I'd live my whole life neither happily nor productively, and I suspect the same is true for you. The risk of burning out and forgetting about the whole thing is high, and that doesn't maximize utility either. You will be able to bring about bigger changes much more effectively if you look after yourself. So, sure, it's worth wondering if you can do more to bring about a good outcome for humanity - but don't make gigantic changes that could lead to burnout. Start from where you are, and step things up as you are able.

Lets say the Singularity is likely to happen in 2045 like Kurzweil says, and you want to maximize the chances that it's positive. The idea that you should get to work making as much money to donate to SIAI, or that you should start researching fAGI (depending on your talents). What you do tomorrow doesn't matter. What matters is the average output over the next 35 years.

This is important because a strategy where you have a emotional breakdown in 2020 fails. If you get so miserable you kill yourself you've failed at your goal. You need to make sure that this fallible agent, XIXIDu, stays at a very high level of productivity for the next 35 years. That almost never happens if you're not fulfilling the needs your monkey brain demands.

Immediate gratification isn't a terminal goal, you've figured this out, but it does work as an instrumental goal on the path of a greater goal.

One thing that I've come with when thinking about personal budgeting, of all things, is the concept of granularity. For someone who is poor, the situation is analogous to yours. The dad, lets say, of the household might be having a similar attack of conscience as you are on whether he should buy a candy bar at the gas station, when there are bills that can't be paid.

But it turns out that a small enough purchase, such as a really cheap candy bar (for the sake of argument), doesn't actually make any difference. No bill is going to go from being unpaid to paid because that candy was bought rather than unbought.

So relax. Buy a candy bar every once in a while. It won't make a difference.

I took too long to link to this.

I don't tell people this very often. In fact I'm not sure I can recall ever telling anyone this before, but then I wouldn't necessarily remember it. But yes, in this case and in these exact circumstances, you need to get laid.

It's not just akrasia, or rather, the implication of strong akrasia really weirds me out.

The easiest mechanism to implement goals would not be vulnerable to akrasia. At best it would be used to conserve limited resources, but that's clearly not the case here. In fact, some goals work just fine, while others fail. This is especially notable when the same activity can have very different levels of akrasia depending on why I'm doing it. Blaming this on hodge-podge circuitry seems false to me (in the general case).

So I look for other explanations, and signaling is a pretty good starting point. What I thought was a real goal was just a social facade, e.g. I don't want to study, I just want to be seen as having a degree. (Strong evidence for this is that I enjoy reading books for some personal research when I hated literally the same books when I had to read them for class.)

Because of this, I'm generally not convinced that my ability to do stuff is broken (at least not as badly), but rather, that I'm mistaken about what I really want. But as Xixidu mentioned, when you start applying rationality to that, you end up changing your own values in the process and not always in a pretty way.

Memetic "basilisk" issue: this subthread may be important:

It is like rationality is a parasite that is hijacking you and turns you into a consequentialist that maximizes only rational conduct.

This (combined with such as Roko's meltdown, as Nisan notes above) appears to be evidence of the possibility of LessWrong rationalism as memetic basilisk. (Thus suggesting the "basilisks" so far, e.g. the forbidden post, may have whatever's problematic in the LW memeplex as prerequisite, which is ... disconcerting.) As muflax notes:

It's just that adding powerful cognitive tools to a not-too-sane mind has a lot of nasty side-effects.

What's a proper approach to use with those who literally can't handle that much truth?

It is like rationality is a parasite that is hijacking you and turns you into a consequentialist that maximizes only rational conduct.

It is common for brains to get hijacked by parasites:

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

Dont despair, help will come :)

I think you need to be a bit more selfish. The way I see it, the distant future can most likely take care of itself, and if it can't, then you won't be able to save it anyway.

If you suddenly were given a very good reason to believe that things are going to turn out Okay regardless of what you personally do, what would you do then?

I can't pinpoint what is wrong.

I can. You are trying to "shut up and multiply" (as Eliezer advises) using the screwed up, totally undiscounted, broken-mathematics version of consequentialism taught here. Instead, you should pay more attention to your own utility than to the utility of the 3^^^3itudes in the distant future, and/or in distant galaxies, and/or in simulated realities. You should pay no more attention to their utility than they pay to yours.

Don't shut up and multiply until someone fixes the broken consequentialist math which is promoted here. Instead, (as Eliezer also advises) get laid or something. Worry more about about the happiness of the people (including yourself) within a temporal radius of 24 hours, a spatial radius of a few meters, and in your own branch of the 'space-time continuum', than you worry about any region of space-time trillions of times the extent, if that region of space time is also millions of times as distant in time, space, or Hilbert-space phase-product.

(I'm sure Tim Tyler is going to jump in and point out that even if you don't discount the future (etc.) as I recommend, you should still not worry much about the future because it is so hard to predict the consequences of your actions. Pace Tim. That is true, but beside the point!)

If it is important to you (XiXiDu) to do something useful and Singularity related, why don't you figure out how to fix the broken expected-undiscounted-utility math that is making you unhappy before someone programs it into a seed AI and makes us all unhappy.

living seems to have an overall negative utility if you are not the kind if person who enjoys being or helping Eliezer Yudkowsky.

There is a difference between negative utility, and less than maximized utility. There are lots of people who enjoy their lives despite not having done as much as they could, even if they know that they could be doing more.

Its only when you dwell on what you haven't done, aren't doing, or could have done that you actually become unhappy about it. If you don't start from maximum utility and see everything as a worse version of that, then you can easily enjoy the good things in your life.

you seem to be holding yourself morally responsible for future states. why? my attitude is that it was like this when I got here.

Give me a good argument of why an FAI shouldn't devote all its resources to trying to leave the universe rather than supporting a galactic civilization for a few years?

Now this looks like a wrong kind of question to consider in this context. The amount of fun your human existence is delivering, in connection with what you abstractly believe is the better course of action, is something relevant, but the details of how FAI would manage the future is not your human existence's explicit problem, unless you are working on FAI design.

If it's better for FAI to spend the next 3^^^3 multiverse millenia planning the future, why should that have a reflection in your psychological outlook? That's an obscure technical question. What matters is whether it's better, not whether it has a certain individual surface feature.

What are you doing all day, is it the most effective way to earn money or help solving friendly AI directly? I doubt it. And if you know that and still don't do anything about it then many people here would call you irrational.

Irrational seems like the wrong world here after all the person could be rational but working with a dataset that does not allow them to reach that conclusion yet. There are also people who reach that conclusion irrationally, reach the right conclusion with a flawed method(unreliable) but are not more rational for having the right conclusions.

Why do you care what happens 3^^^^3 years from now?

If you accept the "rationality is winning" definition, it makes little sense to come up with downsides about rationality, that's what I was trying to point out.

It is quite similar to what you said in this comment.

J considers the social shame of killing 10 other people to save himself worse (according to this utility function) than his own death plus a bunch of others.

Yes, but only if this is really, truly J's utility function. There's a significant possibility that J is suffering from major scope insensitivity and failing to fully appreciate the loss of fun happening when all those people die that he could have saved by living and donating to effective charity. When I say "significant possibility", I'm estimating P>.95.

Note: I interpreted "charities that really work" as "charities that you've researched well and concluded that they're the most effective one's out there." If you just mean that the charity donation produces positive instead of negative fun (considering that there exist some charities that actually don't help people), then my P estimate drops.

Okay, thanks.

I was wondering if that was the case, hence the "general case" disclaimer.