"Epiphany addiction"

One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded.

Er, you do realize I stopped most of my blogging for more or less that reason, right?

Around that time, I started pushing for a (partly LW-inspired) greater focus on empirical improvement in my work, because there was just too much randomness in how long the effects of my then-current techniques would last. Some things were permanent or nearly-so, and others might only last a few days or weeks... and I had no reliable way to predict what the outcome of a particular instance of application would be.

It was a tough shift, because at the time I also had no way to know for sure that anything more reliable or predictable in fact existed, but unlike the more "faith-based" self-help folks, I couldn't just keep ignoring the anomalies in my results.

The good news is I got over that hump and developed more reliable methods. The bad news is that it didn't involve brilliant simple epiphanies, but lots and lots of little hard-won insights and the correlation of tons of practical knowledge.

(And one of those bits of practical knowledge is how to avoid stopping at the "epiphany" phase of a given insight.)

Anyway, I quit blogging about it (at least to the general public) because once you're no longer dealing in simple epiphanies, there starts to be too much inferential distance to be able to talk about anything meaningful, short of creating my own Sequences to reconstruct the inferential chains... one mini-epiphany at a time.

And then you move on to meta-epiphanies…

Think of it as superstimulus to the cool-idea sensor.

Thought exercise: could all the LW/CFAR-favoured model of epistemic rationality be ineffective, even though it sounds really good and make sense? What would the world look like in this case? What would you expect if LW rationality didn't actually work, except to convince its fans that it did work? (For a value of "work" that is defined before examining the results.)

When I was young I was known as "the shy one," and I was awkward around girls. So I started reading instructional books on dating. A few chapters in, each book said "The most important thing is that you put down this book right now and go practice the thing I just told you to do." But I just kept reading, because I was learning so much, and having all those epiphanies felt like getting stronger.

After two years of epiphany addiction and no sex, I finally took some liquid courage and went out and actually talked to women. And then I started to become stronger.

If CFAR and the JDM community can invent an applied rationality that reliably makes people more powerful, it won't be because they've written lots of epiphany-producing writing. It will be because they've discovered teachable rationality skills that can be practiced day after day.

people get a rush of power from neat-sounding realizations, and mistake that feeling for actual power

How do you tell the difference?

For what it's worth, I agree with the spirit of your comment, but am also a little tired of seeing endless variations of it. LW needs better contrarians, but being a good contrarian takes effort. Maybe you could write a discussion post that lays out the strongest form of your arguments? I volunteer to read and comment on drafts, if you wish.

Related:

"Understanding is the booby prize."

Said during a personal development course I've done.

And an outside view of what not getting stuck in epiphanies looks like:

In principle, it’s simple. You’re looking for people who are

Smart, and
Get things done.

Joel Spolsky

A related note is that the neurophysiological effect of the epiphany wears out really quickly. I haven't studied which neurotransmitters exactly produce the original good feeling, but I remember reading (apologies for not having a source here) that the effect is pretty strong for the first time, but fails to produce pretty much any neurological effect after just few repeats. By repeats, I mean thinking about the concept or idea and perhaps writing about it.

In another words, say you get a strong epiphany and subsequent strong feeling that some technique, for an example Pomodoro technique, will make you more efficient. After mulling over this idea or concept for a while, the epiphany and the related feeling fades out. You might still think that the technique would help you, but you lose the feeling. Without the feeling, it is unlikely you will do anything in practice. After losing the feeling, you might even start to doubt that the technique could help you at all. When in fact all that has changed is the neurological feedback because you have repeatedly been processing the idea.

I think this is particularly relevant related to instrumental rationality, because I have not found this to have much effect on how I understand things in general. In the case of some behavioral change, I think it requires a certain amount of such "neurotransmitter-based motivation" in order to have any chance of being implemented. I have pretty successfully implemented a couple of behavioral changes which at the time produced a strong epiphanic feeling, but which nowadays don't evoke pretty much any feeling. I implemented them pretty instantaneously (because they were easy to implement) and had them running before the feeling wore out.

One minor exception to this is that you get a new dose of epiphany if you happen to make a new, novel connection related to the technique you're mulling over. This way you can keep the feeling alive longer, but there are only so many of such new connections and they too wear out eventually.

This is why I think that not only do you have to do something about the epiphany in practice, but you have to do it pretty quickly.

Nothing works if people don't actually change their behavior, so the place to start, IMHO, is looking into who actually changes their behavior after encountering new information. Figuring out what causes that would take you very far. My vague impression is that it's closely related to distrust of authority. If one trusts authority, any change takes you farther away from a trusted safe state and thus carries a large hidden cost.

It's demonstrative that my first reaction to reading this was a feeling of epiphany, and that if I could only internalize this lesson all my problems would be solved. The problem is very pervasive. Becoming aware of it initially actually just made things worse, so I'm commenting to point it out to make sure that no one else risks falling into that trap.

There's also the possibility of infinite regress here, funnily enough. Don't do that either.

I'm amused by the creativity of my cognitive glitches, sometimes.

An alternative hypothesis would be adaptation:

According to adaptation theory, individuals react to events, but quickly adapt back to baseline levels of subjective well-being. To test this idea, the authors use data from a 15-year longitudinal study of over 30 000 individuals to examine the effects of marital transitions on life satisfaction. On average, individuals reacted to events and then adapted back towards baseline levels. However, there were substantial individual differences in this tendency.

Perhaps some of the epiphanies really are transformative. But the individuals may quickly settle back toward a happiness set-point.

I don't think we have got the right explanation for our epiphany addiction here. We are "addicted" to epiphanies because that is what our community rewards its members. Even if the sport is ostensibly about optimizing one's life, the actual sport is to come up with clever insights into how to optimize one's life. The incentive structure is all wrong. The problem ultimately comes down to us being rewarded more status for coming up with and understanding epiphanies than for such epiphanies having a positive impact on our lives.

I independently invented a similar concept, "epiphany junkies", but didn't get around to posting it yet. A couple of points that would've been in that post:

• Achieving an amazing insight about your past suffering (especially other people hurting you somehow), is probably not worth much. The past is past, and unreachable; five seconds ago is as far away as forever. You shouldn't even have been chewing that cud in the first place.
• You probably need a lot of small, nondramatic life optimizations more than you need any particular big huge insight. Besides the addictive quality, a problem with being an epiphany junkie is that it trains you to think that progress comes in the form of dramatic, self-justifying insights about your mother, instead of realizing that you need to stop thinking about all the things wrong with an email after you send it.

Yes, you have a point that success in other fields would be good sign. But your example is a careless one.

You know, Einstein also invented a fridge

According to this io9 article, he did that in his late 40s to early 50s, after his great physics work was over. He was born in 1879 and worked on the fridge with Szilard from 1926 or after. It made the two physicists a bit of money but was not very practically useful. It certainly wasn't something you could have used to predict his physics success in advance, or that he did on the side while occupied with full-time physics.

Despite filing more than 45 patent applications in six different countries, none of Einstein and Szilard's alternative designs for refrigerators ever became a consumer product, although several were licensed, thereby providing a tidy bit of extra income for the scientists over the years. And the Einstein/Szilard pump proved useful for cooling breeder reactors. The prototypes were not energy efficient, and the Great Depression hit many potential manufacturers hard. But it was the introduction of a new non-toxic refrigerant, freon, in 1930 that spelled doom for the Einstein/Szilard refrigerator. The economics supported the freon-based mechanical compressor technology, and that's what most folks still use today.

It seems to me that most of your comments on LW are about the same thing. This predictability makes them boring.

It's like -- oh, here is some discussion about a possible problem; I bet PM will soon come and write a reply saying "yes, your worst fears are all true, and it is actually much worse".

At least for me, the predictable pattern suggests that I should ignore such comments. There is no point in paying attention individually to comments that were generated by a pattern. I perceive them all as one comment, repeated on LW endlessly.

Epiphanies are not necessarily useless or wrong, but cannot effect anything unless they are part of a system created already in motion. You can no more apply an epiphany to an unfocused, inactive human than you can apply it to a rock.

Great point! One of the problems here is that people think that just knowing about something is going to give them the power but this is not the case. Rationality is a skillset like bicycle riding or playing chess and the only way to get good at it is by practicing a lot. You can read lots of books of chess and get great insights but when it comes down to actually playing at the board what matters is what you have internalized through practice.

I've had similar experiences to what the quote describes. I'm in a bit of a rush and have not actually read the link, but here's my thoughts:

Is the epiphany purely in a way of thinking about things, or does it lead to some material change? In other words, is it actionable? For example, if I come up with new way to frame work for extra motivation, I don't put much stock in it, because I know that my mental state is highly variable and it sometimes just won't work. I write it down, and think about it, and see how long it lasts, but I don't expect it to have a huge impact. I'll put higher stock in things that create some system or make some physical change in the world, like finding out about GTD, nootropics, etc. -- there is a much wider set of mental states in which they will likely work.

Ironically, I had an epiphany while reading this post.

LW is itself contrarian, for nth time. All it needs is to look outside itself.

Ignoring definitions of words for the moment, it seems to me that you consider "contrarian" comments worth writing, otherwise you wouldn't write them. All I'm saying is if they're worth writing, they're worth writing well.

Yes, I am very familiar with this kind of experience. I think the point about singular epiphanies of this sort is that they are always too brittle and inflexible to carry you on in any meaningful, long-term sort of way. Two further comments:

1. The realization of "epiphany addiction" it itself a sort of epiphany, in the same sense that this discussion is talking about. I'm not sure what the punchline of -that- should be, except maybe to say, there doesn't seem to ever be any such "magic bullets" in terms of personal understanding ... . Yes, this may seem strange.

2. This whole idea and discussion draw to mind some closely related ideas from eastern (buddhistic) philosophy and thinking, which considers in detail the process of self-growth (ideally, samadhi) by means of self-consideration (generally, meditation). Within those lines of thought, there seems to be a general emphasis on this point in terms of attachment and detachment fallacies; the human being naturally tends to attach to certain dogmas, beliefs, fears, etc. always forgetting the fact that such things are not really real in the same sense that objective reality is real. Thus they are largely illusionary and fallacious in nature. I think a buddhist might probably look at this article and say, "oh, yes I agree," and then promptly forget all about it.

I'm a sucker for rsdmotivation. I feel more confident, more self esteem, happy and exercise better listening to it. But, I can't deconstruct what's actually meaningful in it. It's mostly aphorisms and very basic insights about the world, over cinematic music. The cinematic music alone doesn't do it for me, and the aphorisms alone don't do it for me. Yet, I feel that 'ephiphany' every time. It sorta annoys me, but it works for now.

Comparably, it takes listening to Rise and Grind to get me up sometimes. It works very very well, but it's unclear to me how or why.

Meanwhile Become Legendary helps me act in a disciplined way.

Heck, even the most comically motivating video - Shea la Buff on green screen gets that epiphany kick for me.

Yet. Whenever I mention these things to rationalists the feedback is negative. They work for me! I just can't reduce them to other principles which have evidence. I don't feel like epiphany addiction is a mode of instrumental rationality failure, just epistemic rationality failure.